Meghan Romanelli is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Work at University of Washington. Romanelli’s research program primarily aims to understand and address the multisystemic factors that lead to mental health disparities among LGTBQ communities, with a focus on the role of service access and treatment engagement. Her current research describes LGBTQ care-seekers’ experiences with healthcare discrimination and barriers to care, examines how depression and suicide disparities among sexual and gender minorities occur through the mechanism of forgone care or restricted engagement in care, and identifies unique community factors that might improve service acceptability (e.g., what are LGBTQ communities already doing to stay healthy and how can we incorporate these strengths into formal services?). The long-term goal of this program of research is to develop a theoretically grounded and tailored engagement intervention that will promote the wellbeing of LGBTQ communities through improved mental health service access.
As a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW) with over ten years of experience across various therapeutic settings and modalities, Romanelli considers herself a practice-informed researcher and instructor. As a means to make real-world impact, she integrates her direct practice knowledge, skills, and experiences into both her teaching and research program.
Before joining the UW School of Social Work faculty, Romanelli received training as a pre- and postdoctoral research fellow at the McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research. Romanelli earned her PhD from the New York University Silver School of Social Work in 2019. She holds a master’s of science in social work from Columbia University and a BA in Psychology from the College of the Holy Cross.
Laura Dwyer-Lindgren is an Associate Professor of Health Metrics Sciences at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. Her research mainly focusses on describing and quantifying geographic patterns and inequalities in population health outcomes and health drivers with the ultimate goal of identifying pathways towards better, more equitable health outcomes for all people. At present, Dr. Dwyer-Lindgren is focussing on two major subject areas: measuring geographic, racial/ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in life expectancy, mortality and morbidity (by cause), and risk exposure in the United States; and estimating/mapping family planning indicators on a fine spatial scale using household survey data in sub-Saharan Africa. At IHME, she leads the US Health Disparities Team which aims to estimate disease burden and disparities in disease burden by location, race and ethnicity, and socioeconomic status in the United States. She also is a member of the Local Burden of Disease research team, where her focus is mapping the HIV epidemic globally.
Dr. Dwyer-Lindgren received an MPH in Health Metrics and Evaluation from the University of Washington and a PhD in Public Health from Erasmus University, Rotterdam.
Joana Cunha-Cruz is a Professor in the Department of Clinical and Community Services at the School of Dentistry at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She also holds an affiliate appointment position in the Department of Oral Health Sciences in the School of Dentistry at UW. She is a public health researcher and educator with dental and epidemiology degrees with more than 10 years of public health academic experience.
As a public health researcher with degrees in dentistry and public health epidemiology, Cunha-Cruz’s focus has been on epidemiological and intervention studies on pediatric oral conditions in Alaska Native, Latinx and low-income rural communities, as well as data analyses of national surveys and complex datasets merging different types of electronic health records. Her research explores the biosocial determinants of oral health and explore solutions for health inequities.
Cunha-Cruz received her Dental degree from the State University of Pernambuco, Brazil and MPH and PhD in Public Health (Epidemiology) from the State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Trevor Peckham is a research scientist at the Hazardous Waste Management Program at the King County Department of Natural Resources and Parks. His research is focused on marshalling demographic, environmental, and economic data to understand the burden of exposures to hazardous materials across sociodemographic groups in King County.
Peckham received an MPA in Environmental Policy & Management, an MS in Environmental Health, and a PhD in Environmental & Occupational Hygiene from the University of Washington.
Robert Crutchfield is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology and has an affiliate appointment in the School of Social Sciences at The University of Queensland in Australia. He received his BA from Thiel College in Pennsylvania, and his MA and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University. He has served two terms as department chair. His research is on labor markets and crime, neighborhoods and crime, and race, ethnicity and the criminal justice system. Crutchfield’s book, Get A Job: Labor Markets, Economic Opportunity, and Crime was published by New York University Press in 2014.
Crutchfield is a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), and a University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award winner. He was elected Vice-President of the ASC, Chair of the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Crime, Law, and Deviance Section, and to the Council of the ASA. He served on the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Law and Justice (CLAJ) between 2005 and 2011. He currently chairs CLAJ. Crutchfield has been on several National Academies study panels including the Committee to Improve Research and Data On Firearms, the Committee on Assessing the Research Program of The National Institute of Justice, and the Committee on the Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration. He now is on the Reducing Racial Inequalities in the Criminal Justice System panel. He served on US. Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Program’s Science Advisory Board, the Board of Directors of The Sentencing Project, the Washington State Juvenile Sentencing Commission, and the Board for the Washington State Council on Crime and Delinquency. He is currently on the Seattle Housing Authority’s Board of Commissioners. Crutchfield is a former juvenile probation officer and worked as a Parole Agent for the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole.
Lake Lui is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She has a Ph.D. in Sociology (with a minor in Statistics) from the University of Washington. Her research examines how global forces like economic restructuring, migration, and sociocultural changes interact with national policies in affecting gender relations and the family in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Her major work specifically discusses how social stratification affects migration and marriage dynamics in China, and how they, in turn, influence stratification. She uses both qualitative and quantitative methods in most social inquires, and has a strong belief in using mixed methods to generate new knowledge. Her major publications appear in Sociology, Social Forces, Current Sociology, Journal of Family Issues, Asian Population Studies, Modern China, and Chinese Sociological Review. She is also a book author of Renegotiating Gender: Household Division of Labour When She Earns more than He does. She was a recipient of The Emerald Literati Outstanding Paper award in 2017 for her paper entitled Sexual Harassment of Women in China: The Role of Liberal Sex Attitudes.
Michelle O’Brien (she/her) is a demographer and quantitative social scientist with substantial international experience. She is the Research Manager of the Sexual & Reproductive Health team at the Institute for Disease Modeling within the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Dr. O’Brien’s research has focused on the complex dynamics of women’s health and well-being in contexts of war, violence, and scarce resources. Her work at the Gates Foundation leverages computational demography to better understand the links between individual decision-making, reproductive health products and delivery, and health outcomes. She was a CSDE Fellow and holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Washington.
Dr. Hess is Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, Global Health and Emergency Medicine at the University of Washington. He serves as the director of the UW Center for Health and the Global Environment (CHanGE). Dr. Hess has an MD and an MPH in global environmental health and is residency-trained and board-certified in emergency medicine.
Dr. Hess is a lead author on several national and international climate assessments, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation and the Sixth Assessment Report. He is also an author on the annual Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change.
He is the principal investigator of an NIH-funded grant supporting work in India on the epidemiology of extreme heat and strategies for developing, implementing and evaluating heat early-warning systems.
Dr. Hess is also a consultant for the Climate and Health Program at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he previously worked as a medical adviser on the health effects of climate change and evidence-based interventions to enhance preparedness and promote climate change adaptation at the state and federal levels. He is a section editor at the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine and a recipient of the Presidential GreenGov award. His work has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, NASA, the Wellcome Trust and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, among other funders.
Dr. Michael Brown is a Professor of Geography at the University of Washington. Brown’s research interests focus on the political and urban aspects of geography, specifically LGBTQ people and communities and their relation to broader populations.
Brown has recently become a co-PI on an NSF-funded project entitled, “Shifting ontologies and spatialities of LGBTQ life,” which will track LGBTQ locations in a sample of US localities from 1965-2014. The goal of this study is to be able to do spatial analysis of the distribution of LGBTQ venues in relation to census and other population-areal datasets, with particular respect to the morphologies of “gayborhoods.”
Dr. Spencer is a Native Hawaiian (Kānaka ‘Ōiwi) researcher and currently serves as the Presidential Term Professor of Social Work and Director of Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and Oceania Affairs at the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute (IWRI). His current research focus is health equity among Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander (NHOPI) populations. Using national data, local data, or community-driven data, Dr. Spencer is interested in understanding both the impact of racism and settler colonial society on NHOPI, he also seeks solutions through participatory interventions. This research is grounded in indigenous cultural practices and values that promote health and wellbeing. For over 25 years, his research with African American, Latinx, Asian, as well as NHOPI communities, in the areas of health and mental health has been funded by numerous federal grants and his scholarly work has been published in high impact medical, public health, social work, and interdisciplinary journals. This work includes two randomized controlled trials demonstrating the effectiveness of a culturally tailored, community health worker intervention (CHW) for African American and Latinx patients with type 2 diabetes. Dr. Spencer’s current research relates to the impact of COVID-19 on the health and economic wellbeing of NHOPI in Washington. A goal of Dr. Spencer is to develop a national data set for NHOPI on health, mental health, and service delivery needs.