Over the last 25 years, Peter Vitaliano’s work has focused on relationships between stress and health in several risk groups (spouse caregivers of persons with Alzheimer’s disease, medical students, psychiatric/medical outpatients/inpatients, air traffic controllers, and camp counselors). He has developed and/or revised measures of medical student stress, caregiver burden, patient anger/dyscontrol, process coping, appraisal, neuropsychological function and physician awareness of patient problems. These measures have been used by university researchers, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies in clinical trials, prisons, nursing homes/long term care, rehabilitation facilities, and public health organizations. These psychosocial and behavioral measures have been shown to predict and be predicted by physiological and cognitive measures. He has also focused on moderators of such relationships, such as gender, personality, and co-morbidities. He has used primarily multicohort long-term studies that allow for interactions between exposures to stressors, hard-wired vulnerabilities, and more temporal resources. He attempted to identify mechanisms that can be potentially altered to have long-term public health significance in persons under chronic stress. He has also attempted to isolate groups that are at high risk for negative outcomes. In a perfect world, interventions should be used to help all persons who have deleterious responses to stress, but society can not afford this. In many cases, funds allocated to prolong life in older adults or even to enhance their quality of life may take funds away from children or other groups unable to care for themselves. For this reason, the identification of high risk groups is imperative for maximizing the effect of interventions.
His research program’s long range goal is to better understand the mechanisms by which chronic stress translates into physical, mental, or cognitive health problems. The group is examining caregivers of spouses with AD and demographically-similar spouse non-caregivers across time and assessing the degree to which elevated depression, inflammation, and insulin resistance in caregivers predict cognitive decline in caregivers relative to non-caregivers. They are also attempting to replicate their earlier work that showed that chronic stress and chronic disease moderate each other’s physiological risks. For example, physiological dysregulation that is specific to a disease (e.g., metabolic syndrome with CHD, blood pressure reactivity with hypertension, and immune function with cancer history, HbA1c with diabetes) is exacerbated in caregivers with a chronic disease relative to non-caregivers with a chronic disease, but no such differences occur in caregivers versus non-caregivers without a chronic disease.
Karen Snedker’s research and academic training provides a high level of experience and expertise directly related to demographical and ecological studies. Since the beginning of her career as an NIH post-doctoral fellow at the University of Washington’s School of Nursing, she has worked in interdisciplinary projects and collaborative teams. In her research, she often works with students (both undergraduate and graduate) and other faculty members in a variety of disciplines. She has been able to maintain an active research agenda despite her professorial position at a teaching university. The majority of her research centered on adolescence, prevention and neighborhood context, including two NIH grants. It generally falls into four main areas: 1) crime and community; 2) urban sociology; 3) adolescence and prevention; and 4) health. The scope of her published work appears in sociology, geography, demography, public health and crime academic outlets. Her research reflects traditional sociological work as well as interdisciplinary research with direct implications for prevention research and public policy. Her current research program is two-fold. First, she recently published a book on mental health courts, Therapeutic Justice – Crime, Treatment Courts and Mental Illness (2018). The book provides a unique mixed methodological study of mental health courts within the framework of the larger trend towards problem-solving courts. Second, in collaboration with Dr. Jennifer McKinney (SPU), she is working on a book on homelessness and the rise of tent cities based on qualitative interviews with Tent City 3 residents and a census of tents in the city of Seattle.
Ali Rowhani-Rahbar is the Bartley Dobb Professor for the Study and Prevention of Violence, Professor of Epidemiology, Professor of Pediatrics, Adjunct Professor of Public Policy & Governance, and Director of the Firearm Injury & Policy Research Program at the University of Washington. Rowhani-Rahbar’s research focuses on the evaluation of community-based interventions, social programs, and public policies for their impact on multiple forms of violence with a particular emphasis on preventing firearm-related harm. Specifically, his work focuses on intersections of the healthcare system with the civil and criminal legal system to develop and inform equitable initiatives that prevent firearm violence and promote public health, public safety, and well-being of communities. In recognition of his innovative, interdisciplinary, and impactful research contributions to firearm violence prevention, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2023.
Rowhani-Rahbar has served on the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Board of the National Research Society for the Prevention of Firearm-Related Harms, Firearm Data Infrastructure Workgroup of the Safe States Alliance, Advisory Committee of the Kaiser Permanente Center for Gun Violence Research & Education, Board of Directors of the Society for Advancement of Violence and Injury Research, Advisory Board of the Byrne State Crisis Intervention Program, and Editorial Board of Injury Prevention.
Since 2012, Rowhani-Rahbar has cotaught core epidemiologic methods courses at the University of Washington and mentored numerous trainees in research methods and violence prevention. He received the University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award in 2020 and the University of Washington School of Public Health Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award in 2023. He received his MD from Mashhad University of Medical Sciences in Iran, MPH from Yale University, and PhD from the University of Washington. He completed his postdoctoral training at Stanford University and research fellowship at Kaiser Permanente Division of Research.
Dr. Phipps’s research interests span the fields of cancer epidemiology, molecular epidemiology, and clinical epidemiology. Her current projects focus on the relationship between modifiable lifestyle factors (e.g., smoking, obesity) and survival in individuals with biologically-distinct subtypes of colorectal cancer, and the impact of sleep and sleep disorders on cancer incidence and survival. She also has an interest in molecular subtypes of breast cancer, particularly in risk factors for the poor-prognosis triple-negative subtype of breast cancer.
Dr. Holt’s primary research interests are in the areas of reproductive epidemiology and intimate partner violence. Reproductive epidemiology research projects include an analysis of recent trends in US ectopic pregnancy incidence, studies on the epidemiology of adenomyosis and endometriosis (with emphasis on reproductive and contraceptive risk factors and environmental chemical exposures), and risk factors for oral contraceptive failure, including obesity. Dr. Holt has participated in several research projects concerning intimate partner violence through the Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center. Recent violence-related projects concern the effect of protection orders on future intimate partner violence, and the impact of the justice system response to partner violence on the risk of subsequent violence and injury.
Dr. Hawes’s primary research interests are in human papillomavirus (HPV) and other STDs, cervical cancer, and HIV and he has more than 20 years of research experience conducting cohort studies in Senegal, West Africa as well as in Seattle. He also studies biomarkers for various cancers including cancer of the cervix, anus, lung, breast, ovary, and skin. Dr. Hawes is Associate Director of the UW Strategic Analysis, Research and Training (START) Center and is a faculty member in the UW Center of Excellence in Maternal and Child Health (MCH) Program.