Archives: Affiliates

David Grembowski serves as the Interim Director of the Center for Health Innovation and Policy Sciences in the Department of Health Services. Professor Grembowski’s research interests are the social determinants of health and health inequities; prevention; the design and performance of health care systems, particularly access to health care and the cost, quality, outcomes and equity of care; technology diffusion; and the health care workforce. He was a member of the study team evaluating Washington’s $65 million State Innovation Models Test Award from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. His other studies have examined health care for adults with chronic conditions; efforts to improve quality by increasing access to care in integrated delivery systems; managed care and physician referrals; managed care and patient-physician relationships; cost-effectiveness of preventive services for older adults; fluoridation effects on oral health and dental demand; financial incentives and dentist adoption of preventive technologies; effects of dental insurance on dental demand; and the link between mother and child access to dental care.

Amanda Fretts is most interested in observational and interventional research aimed at improving the cardio-metabolic health of American Indians. To date, her research efforts have primarily focused on the association of physical activity, diet, a healthy lifestyle, or gene*diet interactions with diabetes-related phenotypes. She has been actively involved with the Strong Heart Study (SHS) and Strong Heart Family Study (SHFS), a longitudinal study of cardiovascular disease and its risk factors in 12 American Indian communities, for the past twelve years. She is currently the site Principal Investigator of the SHS/SHFS Dakota Center, and the Principal Investigator of a community-based diet and cooking skills intervention (randomized trial) for American Indians with diabetes who reside in a rural reservation community.

She is also actively involved in several on-going projects related to fatty acids, sphingolipids, and cardio-metabolic outcomes in the Cardiovascular Health Study (CHS), the Fatty Acids and Outcomes Research Consortium (FORCE), and CHARGE (Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology).

Joseph Delaney has a strong background in cardiovascular epidemiology, observational HIV work, pharmacoepidemiology, and epidemiological methods.  He has worked extensively looking at cardiovascular complications due to HIV infection and is a co-author of a chapter for the AHRQ user’s guide for developing comparative effectiveness research.  He has published on cutting edge epidemiological methods that are widely applicable to models in HIV-infected populations in both epidemiology and statistics journals. His expertise includes with-in person designs, generalized estimating equations, Bayesian model averaging, linear mixed models, and marginal structural models.  He also does work on substance use as part of a NIDA funded harmonization effort across a range of small clinical trials in HIV-infected participants.  He has extensive experience with using study designs and statistical methods to improve the inference and analysis of observational medical research.  He has successfully graduated four master’s level students (two in pharmaceutical policies and outcomes, two in nutritional sciences) and one PhD student (pharmaceutical outcomes and policy).  He current supervises three master’s level students (two in nutritional sciences, one in epidemiology) and a PhD candidate (epidemiology).  This diverse background in student supervision makes him extremely well suited to be a part of a multi-disciplinary institute like the CSDE and to be highly involved in working with students, both formally and as a part of student committees.  To date, his graduates have typical entered government service (three placed in the Food and Drug Administration) or clinical practice as registered dieticians.

Gary Chan’s research interests include survival analysis and stochastic processes, epidemiological design and analysis, missing data and causal inference, nonlinear mixed models and predictions, and semiparametric models.

Jennifer Otten is a Professor in Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences and affiliated with the Nutritional Sciences Program and UW Center for Public Health Nutrition. Dr. Otten received her BS in Nutritional Sciences from Texas A&M University, her MS in Nutrition Communications from Tufts University, her PhD in Animal, Nutrition, and Food Sciences from the University of Vermont, and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Stanford Prevention Research Center in the Stanford University School of Medicine. She completed her dietetic internship at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. Between 1998-2006, Dr. Otten served in various capacities for the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C., including as a study director and as the organization’s first communications director.

Her research interests include the impacts of public health, nutrition, and food policies and the policy process on health behaviors and health outcomes; food systems, as it relates to food and nutrition policy; and understanding and improving the ways in which research gets to the public policy table.

 

Rachel Fyall joined the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance as an assistant professor beginning Autumn 2014. Her research investigates the influence of nonprofit organizations on the formation of public policy and in the delivery of public services. She examines how discretion shapes the public services provided by nonprofit contractors as well as advocacy and lobbying by nonprofit organizations. Her primary research context is publicly subsidized low-income housing, including the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program and various homelessness interventions. Rachel’s research has been published in Public Administration Review, Policy Studies Journal, and Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. She is a faculty affiliate of the West Coast Poverty Center and the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, both at UW.

Rachel holds a Ph.D. in Public Affairs from Indiana University, an M.P.A. from George Washington University (nonprofit management concentration), and a B.A. in Sociology and Latin American Studies from Wesleyan University. Before pursuing her doctorate, Fyall worked in housing policy at the Housing Development Consortium in Seattle. She previously worked at the Technology Access Foundation (Seattle) and has professional and volunteer experience in a variety of other nonprofit organizations.