Archives: Affiliates

Hilary Bethancourt is a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. Hilary is passionate about working toward comprehensive and integrative approaches to addressing the social inequities and modifiable diet, lifestyle, and environmental factors that negatively impact physiological, mental, and emotional well-being. She appreciates learning about the sources of biological, social, cultural, and ecological diversity that help shape each individual’s uniqueness and contribute to variable responses to a given diet, lifestyle, or stressor. She is always in pursuit of research projects that can help call attention to the need for public health and nutrition intervention programs that are adequately tailored to individuals’ and communities’ distinct needs, circumstances, and experiences. Currently Hilary is engaged in research focused on quantifying water insecurity experiences among individuals in low- and middle-income settings; identifying who is most in need of safe and reliable water access; and examining how water security relates to food security, physical health, and mental well-being.

Caislin Firth, PhD, MPH is a Research Scientist at the Addictions, Drug & Alcohol Institute (ADAI) at the University of Washington (UW).

Caislin is a social epidemiologist interested in unpacking how public policies shape social and built environments and their influence on health inequities. This pursuit requires interdisciplinary research methods that prioritize community engagement and intersectoral collaborations, given that the mechanisms of change (policy, zoning, infrastructure) often lie outside the purview of public health and academia. With a background working in local government in the Pacific Northwest, Caislin’s research goes beyond answering the questions “do population health interventions (e.g. cannabis legalization) improve health?” by also considering what works, for whom, and in which contexts. In practice, Caislin has studied the underlying causes of inequities in substance use, criminal justice, mobility, and transportation outcomes and the relationships between neighborhood environments and health.

Caislin leads a research program that uses community science to design equitable healthy cities and mitigate negative health effects of gentrification (GENUINE, funded by Canadian Institutes of Health Research). Caislin’s research spans criminal justice, cannabis, healthy city, and population health intervention research with a predisposition towards spatial epidemiology, multi-level modeling, and applying novel epidemiologic methods to research projects.

Caislin is a Horowitz Foundation Social Policy Fellow and received a PhD in Epidemiology from the UW where her dissertation focused on the impacts of adult cannabis legalization on socio-spatial health inequities for youth. Caislin is a consulting editor for Cannabis.

Monica Keith is a biological anthropologist, data scientist, and director of the Anthropological Health & Data Science (AHDS) Lab at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. She researches health disparities and human variation in a biosocial framework that integrates health, socioecological, and genetic data. Her scholarship is focused on addressing disparities in maternal and reproductive health, child growth and nutrition, disease risk, and cardiometabolic health across the life course. She collaborates on several longitudinal field studies with subsistence-based and Indigenous communities in Dominica, Bangladesh, and Argentina. Her focus on reproductive health also extends to the US, where she works with data from the NIH National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to address racialized disparities in pregnancy and birth outcomes. Another emerging area of her scholarship examines the impacts of climate change and environmental exposures, such as extreme heat and flooding, on human physiology, behavior, and health outcomes.

Leo S. Morales, MD, PhD, is a Professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine and an Adjunct Professor of Health Services. He serves as Chief Diversity Officer for the School of Medicine. He also serves as director of the Center for Health Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in the School of Medicine and co-director of the Latino Center for Health in the School of Public Health. Prior to joining UW, he held faculty appoints at UCSF, UCLA and the Group Health Research Institute. Dr. Morales’s research has focused on measurement of patient reported outcomes in diverse populations, and minority health and health disparities including immigrant and Latino Health. Dr. Morales received his medical degree from the University of Washington and completed a residency in primary care internal medicine at UCSF/San Francisco General Hospital. He completed a research fellowship in primary care at UCLA and received his Ph.D. in Policy Studies from the RAND Graduate School. He also received an M.P.H. in Health Services from the University of Washington.

Yuan Hsiao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Yale University. His major research explores the intersection of communication processes, social media, and social networks. He is particularly interested in bringing a social network perspective to understanding a variety of communication and social processes, such as how community networks affect health behavior, how networks on social media contribute to protest mobilization, how social interactions shape the production of health and political misinformation, or how spatial and social relationships affect the spread of religion. He then combines multiple sources of data, such as “big” digital data, survey experiments, or historical archives, to glean insight into general theoretical processes. His work spans the disciplines of communication, sociology, public health, and he is deeply interested in inter-disciplinary dialogues.

LaTonya J. Trotter is an Associate Professor in the Department of Bioethics and Humanities at University of Washington. Dr. Trotter joined the department of Bioethics and Humanities in August 2021. She is a sociologist of medicine whose scholarship is motivated by three things: an empirical commitment to health care as a site of inquiry; a theoretical commitment to understanding the social processes that reproduce inequality in health care; and a methodological commitment to attending to how those processes are reproduced by interactions within the medical workplace. As a sociologist, she takes an institutional view of ethics by considering how social and workplace institutions shape notions of responsibility and what constitutes “good” or ethical decisions by both health care professionals and lay providers of care.  Her book More than Medicine: Nurse Practitioners and the Problems they Solve For Patients, Health Care Organizations and the State (Cornell University Press, 2020), investigates these questions through the empirical case of nurse practitioners working on interdisciplinary teams within long-term care.

E. Roberto Orellana joined University of Washington’s School of Social Work as a professor in 2021. Before joining UW, he was professor and associate dean for research and sponsored projects in the School of Social Work at Portland State University (PSU) where he also served as an affiliate faculty in Public Health and Indigenous Nations Studies. He has held visiting research scientist appointments at Columbia University’s Social Intervention Group, UCSD’s Department of Global Public Health, and collaborating faculty at Harvard University School of Public Health.

Internationally, Orellana has worked with several indigenous organizations, is a member of the board of directors of a research and education nonprofit organization in Guatemala, and has served on the research advisory council of the International Indigenous Working Group on HIV/AIDS. These international institutions are dedicated to HIV prevention and health promotion among indigenous populations worldwide.

Orellana is currently involved in some of the most challenging public-health issues of the day including developing culturally tailored training for Latinx social workers who are providing COVID-19 contact tracing and vaccine promotion among Latinx communities in the Pacific Northwest; a national HIV behavioral surveillance project focused on high-risk populations; and an international indigenous health research training program serving Peru, Guatemala, Nepal and Hawaii.

Orellana received a BA in psychology in 2002, MSW in 2004, and MPH in 2005, all from the University of Washington. In 2009, he earned a doctoral degree in social work from Columbia University and a master’s degree in philosophy from that same institution.

His post-doctoral training included a global health delivery program at Harvard School of Public Health, research fellowships with the UW School of Social Work’s Indigenous Wellness Research Institute and the HIV Intervention Science Training Program at Columbia University. He also received advanced intervention science training from the NIH Office of AIDS Research.

A prolific author and sought-after conference presenter/panelist, Orellana has contributed numerous articles to scientific and research publications and has made keynote or other significant presentations at conferences in Mexico City; Durban, South Africa; Washington, D.C.; Calgary, Alberta; New Orleans; San Francisco; and Pucallpa, Peru, among other places.

Orellana is a member of many professional organizations, including the Society for Prevention Research, Society for Social Work and Research, International AIDS Society, American Public Health Association, Council on Social Work Education, and the Society for the Advancement of Chicano/Hispanic and Native Americans in Science.

Emma Riley is an Assistant Professor at University of Michigan in the Department of Economics. She received her PhD in Economics from the University of Oxford in September of 2019. Her research is in development economics, and her job market paper, “Resisting sharing pressure in the household using mobile money: Experimental evidence on microenterprise investment in Uganda,” examined the impact of disbursing microfinance loans via mobile money on the growth of female-owned micro-enterprises. She was awarded the Edgeworth Prize for Best Doctoral Thesis for her work entitled, “Essays on Mobile Money Services, Microenterprises and Role Models in Developing Countries.”

Prior to her PhD studies, Riley received her MPhil in Economics, with distinction, from the University of Oxford in 2015. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Cambridge, where she received her BA in Economics in 2010, with first-class honors.

Since completing her PhD studies, Emma Riley has been working as a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, affiliated with the department of Economics and the Centre for the Study of African Economies. Her research has a regional focus on Sub-Saharan Africa, and primarily utilizes large-scale randomized field experiments. She has on-going research looking at the impact of digital financial technologies on female enterprises and studying the effects of a village-level poverty alleviation program on household welfare.

Dennis Hogan is Professor Emeritus of Population Studies and Sociology at Brown University. He served as Director of the Population Studies and Training Center until 2000.

Hogan is interested in the life course of American adolescents and the ways opportunities in local environments and resources of parents are converted into successful transitions to adult life. His research includes studies of the health and disability of children and adolescents; population prevalence; access and use of needed medical and supportive services; educational and employment aspirations and experiences; and the impacts of children with disabilities on the lives of other family members.

Hogan has studied reproductive and child health in developing-country populations. His research has resulted in studies of women’s reproductive behaviors and dangers to their well-being, most recently Ethiopia, and participation in a longitudinal study of young people in Ethiopia as they become adults. He is collaborating with researchers at the Institute for Community and Public Health at Birzeit University, Ramallah, the occupied Palestinian territories, on research and on establishing a center for population research.

More information on Dennis Hogan’s research and publications can be found here. 

Jennifer Laird is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Lehman College at City University of New York (CUNY). Prior to coming to Lehman, Dr. Laird was a postdoctoral research scientist at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University from 2016 – 2018. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Washington in 2016.

Dr. Laird’s research focuses on poverty and inequality. As a quantitative sociologist, Dr. Laird conducts her research using data visualization, modeling, and microsimulation methods. She has published articles that investigate the sources of poverty differences across U.S. states, employment inequality in the public sector, and unemployment among Mexican immigrants. Her research has been published in Demography, Social Science Research, and American Sociological Review.