Dr. Sherr’s research focuses on developing and testing practical solutions to support data-driven decision making and service integration into the Primary Health Care framework to improve health system coverage and quality. Dr. Sherr developed the Systems Analysis and Improvement Approach (SAIA), which packages systems engineering tools to support front-line health workers to iteratively improve prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission (PMTCT) services. Originally tested through a cluster randomized trial in Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya and Mozambique, SAIA is currently being scaled-up for PMTCT services in Mozambique, and adapted to address other chronic care needs in low and middle-income countries (including mental health services, integrated HIV testing into family planning clinics, and pediatric HIV testing and linked treatment).
Dr. Sherr leads an implementation research project supported through the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s African Health Initiative that assesses the effectiveness of an enhanced audit and feedback intervention on implementation of national guidelines to address the main causes of neonatal mortality in Mozambique, and builds implementation research capacity for public sector officials.
Dr. Sherr has led the development of implementation science training curricula at the University of Washington Department of Global Health, including the development of the world’s first PhD program in implementation science. Dr. Sherr received his PhD in Epidemiology and MPH in International Health/Health Services from the University of Washington, and a BA in Anthropology/Sociology from Kenyon College.
Child and adolescent sleep problems; interactions between media use, physical activity, and sleep, and the impact on health and behavior; development and testing of health behavior change interventions; pediatric inpatient quality of care and quality improvement research
My research focuses on the socioeconomic mobility and assimilation of immigrants throughout history. I am generally interested in how processes of mobility and labor market outcomes of immigrants are interlinked with societal institutions and economic structures that may condition individual efforts to make it in America. Currently, I am taking advantage of the advent of digitized historical data of US censuses, passenger records, and company personnel files to explore mobility trends of immigrants who entered the US between 1880 and 1924. These data sets allow me to recreate the immigrant experience over the life course, following individuals from the passenger list to US censuses and then tracking them and their families through subsequent censuses over time. By having longitudinal data of individuals, the first of their kind in sociology, I am able to identify the specific mechanisms that helped or hindered economic mobility in the first half of the twentieth century both within and across generations.
Dr. Jones-Smith is an associate professor in the departments of Health Systems and Population Health and Epidemiology and a core faculty member of the Nutrition Sciences Program. She is an epidemiologist, health policy researcher, and population heath scientist with expertise in social and structural determinants of weight-related health. Specifically, her research focuses on investigating upstream drivers of nutrition-related health inequities and follows three main lines: 1) Identifying the Health Impacts of Policies that Address Social and Structural Determinants; 2) Rigorous Evaluation of Nutrition Policies Aimed at Improving Dietary Intake and Population Health; 3) Identifying the role of economic and community resources, including food environments, in weight-related health.
Her research is interdisciplinary and is focused on obtaining actionable results to address upstream social factors, contexts, and policies that influence population health. Her research has been funded by diverse sources including the National Institutes of Health, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the City of Seattle.
Related to the work of the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, Dr. Jones-Smith is a population health scientist and has repeatedly received support from the Population Dynamics Branch of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development for her research, including a fully funded 2-year traineeship with the Carolina Population Center as a doctoral student, a K99/R00 Early Independence Career Award, and most recently an NIH R01 award.
Dr. Jones-Smith has a Masters of Public Health from the University of California, Berkeley, a doctorate in Nutrition Epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and post-doctoral training in health inequities and causal inference.
My primary interests include community sustainable design and development in an international context; urban design and planning history and theory with an emphasis on social and environmental factors; and qualitative and quantitative research methods for evaluating the efficacy of urban form, including challenges of cross-cultural research. Specifically, I focus on the history and contemporary conditions of urbanism and development in the Americas, with an emphasis on public space and the public realm. In particular, I examine the narrative roles that built landscapes play in: politics and society, ecology, and human health and well-being. Thus, first, my work on pedagogical urbanism in Latin America and the United States examines the use of public space to front city regeneration projects. Second, my work on visible ecology critiques and directs the development of eco-literacy in community design and development practices. Finally, my work on human health and well-being is currently being developed through my Mobile Cities project centered on public space investment and community mobility planning in metro transit station projects. These themes are linked by a focus on understanding, reading, critiquing, and modifying narratives in the built environment. Of particular interest to me is the concept of legibility, or comprehensibility, and whether legible environments are capable of shaping sustainable urban places, practices, and policies.
Maria Bleil, PhD, is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing. She is an affiliate faculty member at the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology and a recent recipient of the Charles and Gerda Spence Endowed Professorship.
Dr. Bleil’s research focuses on early life adversity and its influence on developmental pathways that affect life course health and contribute to health disparities. Her work holds significant implications for identifying intervention areas to better manage risk in early life, particularly in promoting reproductive and cardiometabolic health.
Currently, Dr. Bleil leads a 30-year follow-up study of the landmark NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD), in which children and their families were intensively studied from birth through adolescence. The SECCYD follow-up study has successfully located these now-adult participants, who are in their late 20s, to collect extensive social, behavioral, and health data. This data enables testing of the effects of early life adversity and the mechanisms behind these effects (e.g., pubertal timing) on long-term health and disease risk trajectories.
Additionally, Dr. Bleil leads a follow-up study of a recently completed randomized controlled trial (RCT) to assess whether the benefits of an attachment-focused intervention, Promoting First Relationships®, extend to the child’s cardiometabolic health.
She is also a co-investigator on a study examining reproductive aging trajectories, focusing on how individual- and neighborhood-level exposures influence the acceleration of reproductive aging, the timing of menopause, and post-menopausal health.