COLUMBIA - Key Persons
Dr. Abigail (Abba) Greenleaf is a public health demographer whose research focuses on collecting data in low- and middle-income countries where using cell phones to survey populations is an increasingly viable methodology. In the United States, phone-based surveys have been common since the 1980s. In areas such as Africa, until recently there was not sufficient cell phone ownership to create valid phone-based health estimates, and researchers like Dr. Greenleaf have been assessing the reliability of this increasingly popular approach to data collection.
Dr. Greenleaf currently works with ICAP's Population-Based HIV Impact Assessment (PHIA) project. Carried out under the leadership of national ministries of health, PHIA data benchmark a country's progress towards controlling the HIV epidemic. Dr. Greenleaf enjoys this rigorous research because it is efficient, cost-effective and produces high-quality data that can inform targeted policies and programs. As COVID-19 epidemic restraints slowed progress with the PHIA project in several countries, Dr. Greenleaf became part of a team that quickly catalyzed PHIA data and participants in Lesotho to begin a phone-based surveillance system for coronavirus-like symptoms. This real-time data creates weekly estimates infection levels for the national ministry of health.
After a public health class in college introduced her to the field, Dr. Greenleaf joined the Peace Corps to understand public health in a global context, and she spent two years in Cameroon. She then pursued an MPH at Columbia and after she worked for Centers for Disease Control as an Allan Rosenfield Global Health Fellow in Ethiopia and Cameroon. She earned her PhD in the Population, Family and Reproductive Health Department at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health before coming back to Columbia. In addition to her research, Dr. Greenleaf spends a portion of her time teaching.
Adam Reich received his PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley in 2012, and was a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar at Columbia from 2012 to 2014. He focuses on economic and cultural sociology. Much of his research concerns how people make sense of their economic activities and economic positions within organizations. Reich is the author of three books, the most recent of which is Selling Our Souls: The Commodification of Hospital Care in the United States (Princeton, 2014). He is also the author of several peer-reviewed articles, which have appeared in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology and Social Science & Medicine.
Adam Sacarny is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Mailman School of Public Health. Dr. Sacarny's research explores the relationship between health care payment policy, provider and patient decision-making, and clinical quality. Much of this work involves using randomized controlled trials to test interventions in the health care delivery system. His research on health care providers has studied the effects of behavioral interventions on overprescribing, the adoption of hospital documentation and coding practices, and the relationship between hospital clinical outcomes and market share.
Dr. Sacarny is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an Affiliate of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). He received his PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Economics and Education at Teachers College
Alex Eble is an Assistant Professor of Economics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. His research focuses on two core areas. In the first research area, he works to understand how children form beliefs about their own ability, and how this affects their human capital development. In the second research area, he works to identify, evaluate, and study the scalability and generalizability of potentially high-leverage policy options to raise learning levels in the developing world. His work draws on insights from fieldwork and experience as a development practitioner in China, The Gambia, Guinea Bissau, and India. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Brown University, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow; an MSc in Development Studies from the London School of Economics; and a BA in economics and East Asian languages and cultures from Indiana University, Bloomington, where he learned to read, write, and speak Mandarin Chinese.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor at Columbia University 's School of International
Alexander Hertel-Fernandez is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. Hertel-Fernandez studies the political economy of the United States, with an emphasis on the politics of organized interests, especially business, and public policy. He has published academic research on the politics of social programs, including unemployment insurance and Medicaid, and has written policy briefs on a variety of topics related to Social Security and other social insurance programs. He currently serves on the board of the National Academy of Social Insurance.
Dr. Aiello is the James S. Jackson Healthy Longevity Professor of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health. Dr. Aiello's research examines the ways in which social inequalities and psychosocial stressors shape immunological and epigenetic processes and impact healthy longevity. Dr. Aiello leads the Program on Biosocial Aging and Health Equity in the Columbia Aging Center, which focuses on life course processes, psychosocial stressors, and biomarkers of aging and health. She is the Deputy Director of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) Wave VI, which is one of the largest life course studies of the US population.
Alyssa Basmajian is a PhD candidate in Sociomedical Sciences with a concentration in medical anthropology. Her research interests are grounded in the social and political tensions surrounding reproductive health in the United States. For Basmajian's master's thesis research, she examined a new form of political expression known as the abortion or full spectrum doula by drawing on theories of embodiment and social transformation. She has received funding from the NIH PreDoctoral Traineeship in Gender, Sexuality, and Health and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF-GRF). For her dissertation, Basmajian plans to further investigate doulas and the reproductive care they provide in the Midwestern and Southern United States. Most recently, Basmajian has received funding from the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (NSF-DDRIG) to further support her research.
Amy Zhou is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her research broadly examines health inequalities in both the US and global settings. One line of research focuses on the global health field. Based on extensive fieldwork and interviews in Malawi, her current book project looks at how international efforts to address the HIV epidemic have transformed healthcare institutions and the way patients manage their health. This research also draws attention to how global health policies can have unintended consequences for maternal HIV transmission, women's use of HIV treatment, and reproductive health. Another line of research looks at racial health inequalities in the US, focusing on the meaning of race in delivering racially-targeted health services. Recently, she has started a new project that examines the social and ethical implications of gene drive technologies. Amy received her Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA and postdoctoral training at the UCSD Institute for Practical Ethics.
Professor Gelman's past research has been in two major areas: (1) statistical theory, methods, and computation, and (2) applications in political science, public health, and policy. His statistical work has centered on Bayesian inference, multilevel models, and graphical methods. Gelman's research focuses on building and checking multilevel models in applications including time series of public opinions, laboratory measurements of allergens, income and voting in elections, political polarization, and psychometrics. Gelman directs the Applied Statistics Center, which has connections with over a dozen departments, schools, and institutes at Columbia, and he is also conducting an ongoing series of methodological workshops with faculty at the Columbia School of Social Work.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Epidemiology
Dr. Rundle is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology in the Mailman School of Public Health. He is a member of CPRC's steering committee and directs the CPRC's Geographic Information Systems consulting service. Dr. Rundle's work focuses on the causes, and cancer related consequences, of obesity, with a major focus on how neighborhood built and social environments shape physical activity, dietary patterns, and in turn, obesity risk. He and his team are also developing new methods to measure neighborhood contexts and apply these data to studying neighborhood effects on health. You can visit his team web site, Built Environmental and Health Research Group, here (beh.columbia.edu).
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Sociology
Angela Simms is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies. Her research examines how legacy and contemporary market and government processes in metropolitan areas shape racial inequality, with particular focus on the suburban Black middle class. Angela's academic articles, published in the journal Phylon, include: (1) "The Veil of Racial Residential Segregation in the 21st Century: The Suburban Black Middle Class and Pursuit of Racial Equity"; and (2) "Racial Residential Segregation and School Choice: How a Market-based Policy for K-12 Access Creates a ‘Parenting Tax' for Black Parents." She also has extensive public policy experience. Before academia, she was a Presidential Management Fellow and legislative analyst for seven years at the federal government agency the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) within the Executive Office of the U.S. President, serving in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama Administrations. At OMB, Angela managed the clearance process for, edited, and approved policy documents the Justice Department submitted to Congress to ensure consistency with the President's overall policy agenda. She completed her PhD in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in May 2019. Angela holds a master's degree in public policy from the University of Texas at Austin and a bachelor's in government from the College of William and Mary. She was born and raised in Woodbridge, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C.
Angela Nguyen, DrPH, MPH, is a postdoctoral research scientist for the GATE Program. She earned her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health and her MPH from the New York University School of Global Public Health. Angela's interdisciplinary research to date has focused on vulnerable populations, social determinants of health, and environmental exposures. Her dissertation centered on the epidemiology of disaster mental health, particularly the community- and individual-level factors associated with mental health recovery among displaced women survivors. More recently, she collaborated on a quantitative research study on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on period poverty in the U.S. With GATE, Angela will engage on several research projects ranging from examining the dissemination of puberty educational content to young people, to assessing the impact of menstrual health on the daily lives of those with periods.
Professor Bartel is the Merrill Lynch Professor of Workforce Transformation at Columbia Business School and the Director of Columbia Business School's Workforce Transformation Initiative. She is an expert in the fields of labor economics and human resource management and has published numerous articles on employee training, human capital investments, job mobility, and the impact of technological change on productivity, worker skills, and outsourcing decisions. Bartel received the 1992 Margaret Chandler Award for Commitment to Excellence in teaching. She teaches Managerial Negotiations and Economics of Organizational Strategy. Bartel is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the recipient of numerous research grants. She has also served as a consultant for many companies on strategic human resource management issues and has directed executive education programs for talented women executives who are positioning themselves for career advancement.
Job Titles:
- Environmental Health Scientist
Anne (Annie) Nigra is an environmental health scientist (PhD, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health '20) and environmental epidemiologist (ScM, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health '16). Dr. Nigra's long-term scientific goal is to reduce racial/ethnic and socioeconomic inequities in environmental exposures and related adverse health outcomes. To this end, her work evaluates regulatory policies, characterizes inequities in exposures, develops epidemiological effect estimates, and supports community-directed research and training efforts. Her research focuses on US drinking water regulations and exposures, metal exposures, metal-related chronic disease, and environmental justice, and utilizes collaborations with several large epidemiological cohorts. She also has an emerging research interest in adverse birth outcomes, and manages the Columbia University Drinking Water Dashboard (https://msph.shinyapps.io/drinking-water-dashboard/). Dr. Nigra also holds a BA in Biology from Oberlin College ('14).
Ashwin Vasan, MSc, MD, PhD is a primary care physician and public health expert with more than 15 years of experience working to improve health, social welfare, and public policy for vulnerable populations. Since 2014 he has been on the faculty at Mailman, where he leads a graduate seminar on implementation science and global health, and at the College of Physicians and Surgeons where he cares for low-income, Medicaid/Medicare or uninsured patients from Washington Heights, Harlem, and the South Bronx as a primary care internist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center/NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. His current work is focused at the intersection of health equity, public policy, and our domestic political system, with an aim to foster a more representative political discourse around health and its social determinants in the public square. From 2016-2019 Dr Vasan was appointed as the founding Executive Director of the Health Access Equity Unit at the New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene, a first of its kind public sector health program that leverages the agency's assets in surveillance, research, program design, implementation science, and policy development to improve community-based health and human services for the most vulnerable and overlooked populations in the City, including people involved in the criminal justice system, refugees/asylees, undocumented, and chronically homeless. In this role, built the bureau and led the development of the NYC Health Justice Network, a health and social sector partnership providing trauma-informed, peer-led community-based health and human services to people involved in the justice system and their families. This role built off of Dr Vasan's decade of experience at the intersection of global health and primary care working with Partners In Health (PIH) in Rwanda, Lesotho, and Boston, and the World Health Organization in Uganda and Geneva (under recently-departed World Bank President Jim Yong Kim). Dr Vasan worked as a Technical Officer on the WHO/UNAIDS "3by5 Initiative" to expand antiretroviral treatment access in the developing world, and subsequently supported the Ugandan Ministry of Health in scale-up and quality improvement of HIV treatment in four districts in the southwest of the country, the first areas to attempt front-line treatment. At PIH he supported programs in Boston, Lesotho, and Rwanda, where he led efforts to improve primary care delivery using WHO Integrated Management guidelines. At Mailman, prior to departing for NYC DOHMH, Dr Vasan was also the Deputy Director of the ARCHES (Advancing Research on Comprehensive Health Systems) program, a $17M Doris-Duke funded program of community health systems development and implementation science in Ghana and Tanzania. Dr Vasan also holds non-clinical appointments as an Associate Physician in the Division of Global Health Equity at the Brigham & Women's Hospital/Harvard Medical School, and as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Population Health at New York University School of Medicine.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Economics at Barnard College
Belinda Archibong is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her research areas include development economics, political economy, economic history and environmental economics with an African regional focus. Her research investigates the role of institutions and environment in inequality of access to public services and the development of human capital. Some current research studies the impact of climate-induced health shocks on gender gaps in human capital investment, the economic burden of epidemic disease, and the impact of air pollution from gas flaring on human capital outcomes. Other works study the economics of prison labor, the links between taxation and public service provision and the role of gender and ethnic bias in hiring in African countries. She is a faculty affiliate at Columbia University's Center for Development Economics and Policy (CDEP), The Earth Institute at Columbia University, the Institute of African Studies, the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, the Columbia Population Research Center (CPRC), and the Center for Environmental Economics and Policy (CEEP).
She joined the Barnard Economics faculty in 2015 and received a B.A. in Economics/Philosophy and a Ph.D. in Sustainable Development from Columbia University. Her CV and further information can also be found on her personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/belindaarchibongbarnard/
Job Titles:
- Fellow of the American Heart Association
Dr. Caceres is a fellow of the American Heart Association, American Academy of Nursing, and New York Academy of Medicine. In 2020 he was the recipient of the National Institutes of Health's Sexual and Gender Minority Early-Stage Investigator Award.
Before joining CSSW, Brenda Jones Harden was the Alison Richman Professor for Children and Families at the University of Maryland School of Social Work. She directed the Prevention and Early Adversity Research Laboratory, where she and her research team examined the developmental and mental health needs of young children who have experienced early adversity, particularly those who have been maltreated or have experienced other forms of trauma. A particular focus was preventing maladaptive outcomes in these populations through early childhood programs. She conducted numerous evaluations of such programs, including parenting interventions, early care and education, home visiting services, and infant mental health programs. Dr. Jones Harden has consulted with and provided training to numerous organizations regarding effective home visiting, infant and early childhood mental health, reflective supervision, infant/toddler development and intervention, and working with high-risk parents.
She began her career as a child welfare social worker, working in foster care, special needs adoption, and prevention services, the latter of which became her long-term practice and research focus. She is a scientist-practitioner who uses research to improve the quality and effectiveness of child and family services and to inform child and family policy. She received a PhD in developmental and clinical psychology from Yale University and a Master's in Social Work from New York University.
Brendan O'Flaherty, Ph.D. studies urban economics in relation to homelessness and crime. He has been teaching at Columbia for over thirty years and previously served as aide to Kenneth Gibson, Newark's first African-American mayor.
Brennan Rhodes-Bratton-a recipient of the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award-conducting dissertation research to identify and address the role that food practices and dispositions play in the risk of obesity among residents living in a neighborhood undergoing gentrification. During her traineeship in the Initiative for Maximizing Student Diversity, she worked as a research assistant in the development of a conceptual framework for the emerging issue of energy insecurity and also led a community-based participatory research project unveiling the lived experience of New York City Housing Authority residents with a PhotoVoice project entitled "Going Beyond the Mold." Her professional and educational career to-date comprises nearly a decade of experience in public health including research in environmental health, built-environment, nutrition and wellness education, community-based participatory research, health policy analysis, housing insecurity, extensive training in the application of social theory to public health problems, and applied experiences in PhotoVoice and intervention design, implementation, and evaluation. Rhodes-Bratton's long-term career goal is to become a public health mixed methods researcher with expertise in theoretically-driven research and interventions, doing research grounded in sociological concepts and theories about the social and economic determinants of health and illness.
Job Titles:
- Co - Director of the Justice Lab
- Professor
Bruce Western is Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Justice Lab at Columbia University. His research has examined the causes, scope, and consequences of the historic growth in U.S. prison populations. Current projects include a randomized experiment assessing the effects of criminal justice fines and fees on misdemeanor defendants in Oklahoma City, and a field study of solitary confinement in Pennsylvania state prisons. Western is also the Principal Investigator of the Square One Project that aims re-imagine the public policy response to violence under conditions of poverty and racial inequality. He was the Vice Chair of the National Academy of Sciences panel on the causes and consequences of high incarceration rates in the United States. He is the author of Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison (Russell Sage Foundation, 2018), and Punishment and Inequality in America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar, and a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study. Western received his PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and was born in Canberra, Australia.
Dr. Lea's research and scholarship investigate the intersectionality of race/ethnicity, class, and gender in educational, correctional, and neighborhood contexts, and the impact these issues have on the health and well-being of young Black men and boys at risk and involved in the juvenile and criminal punishment systems. The overarching aims of this work is to develop knowledge and build theory that informs policies, practices, and interventions that can promote resilience and healthy development among young Black men and boys', as well as lessen their risk for health-compromising behaviors, arrest, incarceration, and recidivism.
Dr. Lea's research is informed by his practice experience with racial/ethnic minority youth and young adults in community, educational and correctional settings; prior research on prisoner reentry, school reform, and workforce and youth development; and training in qualitative methodology and community-based participatory research. Dr. Lea received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, MSW from the University of Michigan, and a B.A. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.
Christian is a Counseling Psychology PhD student at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he conducts research within the Stigma, Identity, and Intersectionality Research Lab. Broadly, his research, clinical, and teaching interests take an intersectional and decolonial approach to understanding how systems and institutions affect the mental and sexual health of multiply-marginalized people-with a specific interest in the well-being of LGBTQ+ BIPOC adolescents and emerging adults.
To explore these interests, Christian has engaged in mixed methods research exploring the effects of oppression, privilege, and collective identity attitudes on the mental health and career development of sexual, gender, and racial/ethnic minority people. He is a predoctoral fellow in the SAMHSA-funded American Psychological Association Minority Fellowship Program, which provides support to develop his research and clinical skills working with racial and ethnic minority people. Currently, Christian is the Principal Investigator of a scale development project to better assess the unique manifestations of minority stress that impact sexual minority Latinx people.
Prior to arriving at Columbia University, Christian worked at Northwestern University's Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing, where he engaged in community-based participatory research and program evaluation projects focused on HIV prevention and treatment, substance use, and the mental health of LGBTQ+ young people.
He received his MA degree in Clinical Psychology and Education-as well as an Advanced Certificate in Sexuality, Women, and Gender-from Teachers College, and holds a BA in Psychology from the University of Chicago.
In addition to being a CPRC Fellow, Christian is also a psychology extern at two outpatient clinics in the New York City area, where he provides bilingual (English/Spanish) psychotherapy and assessment services to children, adolescents, and young adults.
Christine P. Hendon develops biomedical optics technologies for biomedicine to guide interventional procedures and to provide insights into the structure-function relationship of biological normal, diseased, and treated tissues. She has worked on developing next-generation optical coherence tomography systems and integrated therapeutic catheters with near infrared spectroscopy, along with real-time processing algorithms to extract physiological information. Hendon collaborates extensively with investigators from Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Medical Center. Her group has developed integrative optics and therapeutic probes for improving the treatment of cardiac arrhythmias.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health
Christopher Morrison is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health who specializes in spatial epidemiologic methods. His research, funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, seeks to understand how social and physical environmental conditions affect population health, particularly injuries, alcohol use, and alcohol-related harms. His recent work has examined associations between ridesharing services (such as Uber) and motor vehicle crashes, bicycle infrastructure and bicycle crashes, and firearm laws and firearm violence. Dr. Morrison previously worked as an Associate Research Scientist at the Prevention Research Center of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation in Berkeley, California, and he completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Penn Injury Science Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a Ph.D. in epidemiology from Monash University, Australia.
Job Titles:
- Senior Research Scientist at CPRC
Christopher Wimer is a Senior Research Scientist at CPRC and a co-Director of the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at the School of Social Work. He works on research projects within the Children, Youth, and Families and Urbanism Research Areas. He is the Project Director on CPRC's New York City Longitudinal Study of Wellbeing, and also manages and participates in the research on many of CPRC's poverty-related research projects. Wimer's research focuses on measuring poverty and disadvantage, how families cope with poverty and economic insecurity, and the role of social policies in the lives of disadvantaged families.
Job Titles:
- Expert
- Law School As Professor of Law
Clare Huntington '96 is a nationally recognized expert in family law and poverty law. Her wide-ranging scholarship explores the institutions and empirical foundations of the legal system's approach to relationships. Her research focuses on early childhood development, aging, and the challenges facing nonmarital families because of the law's myopic focus on marriage.
Huntington's research has appeared in the Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Michigan Law Review, New York University Law Review, Stanford Law Review, and Yale Law Journal, among other academic journals. She is the author of Failure to Flourish: How Law Undermines Family Relationships and a co-editor of Social Parenthood in Comparative Perspective. She serves as associate reporter for the American Law Institute's Restatement of the Law, Children and the Law.
Before entering academia, Huntington was an attorney adviser in the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and clerked for Justices Harry A. Blackmun and Stephen G. Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Merrick B. Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and Judge Denise L. Cote of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Huntington joined Columbia Law School as professor of law on July 1, 2023. She was previously a visiting scholar in 2008 and Nathaniel Fensterstock Visiting Professor of Law in 2022. Prior to her appointment at Columbia Law, she was the Joseph M. McLaughlin Professor of Law at Fordham Law School. During her tenure there, she was associate dean for strategic initiatives and associate dean for research and was named Teacher of the Year in 2021. She was previously associate professor at the University of Colorado Law School.
Dr. Duarte is the Ruane Professor Ruane Professor for the Implementation of Science for Child & Adolescent Mental Health in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Columbia University/New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI). Dr. Duarte is an expert on development of mental disorders in children, adolescents, and young adults with special emphasis on racially and ethnically minoritized youth. Her research has a strong focus on intergenerational processes that may lead to psychiatric disorders. Through the use state-of-the art sampling, recruitment, and culturally appropriate assessment methodologies, she generates population-based knowledge of relevance to diverse, often underserved and understudied populations. This work is described in more than one hundred publications in high impact journals in the fields of psychiatry and psychology. She is the Director of the Center for Intergenerational Psychiatry and leads the Boricua Youth Study, which studies how mental disorders develop from childhood to young adulthood among Puerto Rican families. She is committed to mentoring students, fellows and junior faculty, with special interest and experience in supporting trainees from low and middle income countries and from racial and ethnic groups underrepresented in science.
Dani Dumitriu, MD, PhD, is a Pediatrician, Neuroscientist and Environmental Health Scientist. She joined Columbia Univerisity as an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics (in Psychiatry) in November 2018. She dedicates 80% of her time to basic science research into the neurobiological basis of resilience at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and 20% time to caring for newborns in the Well-Baby Nursery.
Dr. Dumitriu completed all her training at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Following her graduation from the MD/PhD program in 2013, she matched into the Pediatrics residency. She then successfully negotiated a custom-tailored individualized residency program with significant protected research time. This allowed her to maintain an active research commitment, while completing a residency in General Pediatrics and a fellowship in Pediatric Environmental Health over a five-year period. This ambitious and unconventional path was born out of a desire to escape the growing physician-scientist "leaky pipeline," which has resulted in fewer and fewer MD/PhD graduates returning to bench science following prolonged clinical focus during residency. Taking full advantage of the flexibility of this custom program, Dr. Dumitriu began building her research program and was awarded her first R01 from NIMH while still in clinical training. In addition to her busy research and clinical schedules, Dr. Dumitriu is passionate about developing innovative avenues for the retention of physician-scientists in basic research.
In the lab, Dr. Dumitriu conducts NIH-funded research on the functional and structural connectivity patterns that differ in stress-susceptible versus stress-resilient mice. In collaborative work with her fellowship mentor, Dr. Manish Arora at Mount Sinai, she investigates pre- and post-natal patterns of inflammation associated with future risk of autism using naturally shed human teeth, which during development trap various compounds akin to developing tree rings. Additionally, she is currently working with an inter-disciplinary team of collaborators to spearhead an epidemiological-level study of wild rat stress and resilience in New York City.
Daniel Giovenco, PhD, MPH is a behavioral scientist who uses geographical information systems, field data collection, and survey data to uncover how community characteristics influence disparities in substance use. His specific areas of interest include the marketing of tobacco products at the point-of- sale, the public health implications of tobacco harm reduction, and the co-use of marijuana and tobacco. Dr. Giovenco's research has been published in leading public health journals such as the American Journal of Public Health, Tobacco Control, and the Journal of Adolescent Health. In addition to research, Dr. Giovenco teaches graduate courses in public health intervention design and is a member of the Prevention, Control and Disparities Program at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Giovenco is a 2016 recipient of the NIH Director's Early Independence Award, a grant from the National Institutes of Health awarded to junior scientists who have the ability to flourish as an independent researcher without the need for traditional post-doctoral training. His project will examine how the promotion of tobacco products with varying levels of risk differs across neighborhoods and how this may influence harm reduction behaviors and subsequent health disparities.
The goal of Dan Belsky's work is to reduce social inequalities in aging outcomes in the US and elsewhere. His research sits at the intersection of public health, population & behavioral science, and genomics. His studies seek to understand how genes and environments combine to shape health across the life course. Belsky's research uses tools from genome science and longitudinal data from population-based cohort studies. The aim is to identify targets for policy and clinical interventions to promote positive development from early life and extend healthspan. Belsky is a member of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Child Brain Development Network and from 2016-2018 was an Early Career Fellow of the Jacobs Foundation.
Diana Hernandez (PhD) focuses her work on the social and environmental determinants of health by querying the impacts of policy and place-based interventions on the health and socioeconomic well-being of vulnerable populations. Her community-oriented research examines the intersections between the built environment (housing and neighborhoods), poverty/equity and health with a particular emphasis on energy insecurity. Much of her research is conducted in her native South Bronx neighborhood, where she also lives and invests in social impact real estate. Dr. Hernandez is currently a Principal or Co-Investigator on several projects related to structural interventions in low-income housing (i.e. energy efficiency upgrades, cleaner burning fuel source conversions, smoke-free housing compliance, new finance and capital improvement models in public housing and post-Sandy resilience among public housing residents) or otherwise related to alleviating the consequences of poverty on health (i.e. attrition study of the Nurse Family Partnership Program and qualitative evaluation of the Medical Legal Partnership model). Her work is currently funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the JPB Foundation, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, among others. Her research has been published in leading journals including the American Journal of Public Health, Energy Policy, Public Health Reports and Energy Research and Social Sciences. Professor Hernandez teaches Qualitative Research Methods at the graduate level and has also taught undergraduate courses on Health Disparities and Cultural Competence. She has advised numerous master's theses and doctoral dissertations. In addition, she actively engages in a variety translational research activities through consulting, board service and social entrepreneurship.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work
Dr. Alissa Davis is an Assistant Professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work. Her research focuses on the development of interventions to improve linkage to and retention in care for HIV/STI and substance use services for marginalized populations, including racial/ethnic and sexual minorities, individuals involved with the criminal justice system, and people who inject drugs (PWID). Her research integrates both quantitative and qualitative methods. She has worked both domestically and internationally in Eastern Europe and Central Asia and China. Her work has been supported by the National Institute of Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Fogarty International Center, and the Mellon Foundation. Her current research focuses on developing and adapting a couples-based intervention to improve antiretroviral therapy adherence among people who inject drugs in Kazakhstan and examining factors associated with recurrent bacterial vaginosis infection among women in New York City.
Job Titles:
- Postdoctoral Research Scientist
Dr. Arun Balachandran is a Postdoctoral Research Scientist working with Dr. Dan Belsky at the Robert N Butler Columbia Aging Center. He received his PhD in demography from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands in 2020. He did his pre-doctoral training at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, India, and has a background in the discipline of economics with a master's degree from the Madras School of Economics, India. He worked towards 'Population Ageing in Europe and Asia: Beyond Traditional Perspectives' during his Ph.D., where he developed new measures of population ageing for comparisons across Europe and Asia, with a particular focus on gender. His research interests are interdisciplinary and intersects across demography, population ageing, quantitative methodology and gender. His works has been published in Ageing & Society, Journal of Ageing and Health, SSM-Population Health, Economic & Political Weekly and The Lancet. He was awarded the KB Pathak Memorial Award in 2019 for methodological innovation in Population and Health, by Indian Association for the Study of Population. Previously, he has worked with the University of Maryland College Park and with the Population Council.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor at the Columbia School of Social Work
Dr. Brooke S. West is an Assistant Professor at the Columbia School of Social Work and Faculty Affiliate of the Social Intervention Group (SIG). As a medical sociologist, Dr. West's research focuses on the social, economic, physical and policy factors underlying inequities in health among marginalized and criminalized populations, both globally and domestically. Drawing on both social science and public health approaches, her work centers primarily on the social and structural determinants of substance use and HIV/STI, with newer work examining violence exposure and reproductive health. Dr. West is the principal investigator on a NIDA-funded study that examines the intersection of venue-based risk and networks for substance-using women in Tijuana, Mexico, with the goal of capturing the dynamic and overlapping nature of risk environments and how connections to and movement between places can confer health risks. The integration of place-based and network methods, both of which have wide applicability for addressing health inequities in diverse settings, will inform the development of novel intervention approaches that seek to reshape environments and create safer spaces. Dr. West also works on projects related to overdose among women and the health of women more broadly, including the evaluation and development of sexual and reproductive health programs in Kenya, South Africa, Zambia, and the United States. Before joining the School of Social Work, Dr. West was an Assistant Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) with a dual appointment in the Department of Sociology. Prior to her appointment as an Assistant Professor at UCSD she was a Postdoctoral Fellow on a T32 focused on substance use and infectious diseases. Dr. West received her Ph.D. in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and her M.A. in Sociology from Cornell University.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor at Columbia University School of Social Work
Dr. Carmela Alcántara is an Associate Professor at Columbia University School of Social Work, Faculty Affiliate of the Social Intervention Group, Faculty of the Columbia Population Research Center, and Director of the Sleep, Mind, and Health Research Program. She is a clinical psychological scientist with expertise in social epidemiology and behavioral medicine. Her interdisciplinary program of research integrates frameworks and methodologies from psychology, public health, social work, and medicine to study how contextual factors (i.e., immigrant status, socioeconomic status, race) shape exposure to psychosocial risks and resources (acculturation, transnational ties, discrimination, stress, anxiety), and their association with sleep, mental health, and cardiovascular health in underserved populations, particularly in Latina/o/x immigrant communities. A long-term goal of Dr. Alcántara's research is to develop community-engaged and evidence-based behavioral interventions to reduce disparities in mental health care and promote health equity. She has obtained nearly $3 million dollars from federal sources and private foundations, including a K23 award from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to study sleep and minority health, and an R01 from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to conduct a randomized controlled trial of a digital behavioral sleep medicine intervention culturally adapted for Spanish-speaking primary care patients. Dr. Alcántara has held national leadership positions and provides sought after expertise in Latina/o/x immigrant and minority health, health psychology, behavioral sleep medicine, and social determinants of health.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work
Dr. Courtney D. Cogburn is an associate professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work and faculty of the Columbia Population Research Center. She employs a transdisciplinary research strategy to improve the characterization and measurement of racism and in examining the role of racism in the production of racial inequities in health. Dr. Cogburn's work also explores the potential of media and technology in eradicating racism and eliminating racial inequities in health. She is the lead creator of 1000 Cut Journey, an immersive virtual reality experience of racism that premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. Dr. Cogburn completed postdoctoral training at Harvard University in the Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar Program and at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. in Education and Psychology, and MSW from the University of Michigan and her BA in Psychology from the University of Virginia.
Dustin T. Duncan, ScD (he/him) is a social and spatial epidemiologist, studying how neighborhood characteristics influence population health and health disparities. Dr. Duncan's intersectional research focuses on Black gay, bisexual and other sexual minority men and transgender women of color. His research has a strong domestic focus--including in New York City and the Deep South--and his recent work spans the globe such as in West Africa, especially with Columbia's International Center for AIDS Care and Treatment Programs (ICAP). Methodologically, his research utilizes a geospatial lens to apply advanced geographic information systems, web-based and real-time geospatial technologies, and geospatial modeling techniques. Working in collaborations with scholars across the world, he has over 150 high-impact scientific articles, book chapters, and books and his research has appeared in major media outlets including U.S. News & World Report, The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN. Dr. Duncan's work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the HIV Prevention Trials Network, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Verizon Foundation, and the Aetna Foundation. He currently leads two NIH-funded R01 studies, as well as studies funded by other sources, and mentors K and other awards of junior scientists. In 2019, he was awarded the mid-career Emerging Public Health Professional Award from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Job Titles:
- Harold R. Medina Professor of Law
Elizabeth S. Scott is the Harold R. Medina Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Curriculum at Columbia Law School. Scott teaches family law, property, criminal law, and children and the law. She has written extensively on marriage, divorce, cohabitation, child custody, adolescent decision-making, and juvenile delinquency. Her research is interdisciplinary, applying behavioral economics, social science research, and developmental theory to family/juvenile law and policy issues.
She was the founder and co-director of the University of Virginia's Interdisciplinary Center for Children, Families and the Law. She also held a professorship at the university and served as legal director of the university's Forensic Psychiatry Clinic, Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy.
From 1995 to 2006, Scott was involved in empirical research on adolescents in the justice system as a member of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice.
In 2008, she published Rethinking Juvenile Justice with developmental psychologist Laurence Steinberg. The book draws on their collaborative work to offer a developmental framework for juvenile justice policy, and received the 2010 Society for Research in Adolescence Social Policy Best Authored Book Award.
Scott received her J.D. from the University of Virginia in 1977 and a B.A. from the College of William & Mary in 1967.
Job Titles:
- Healthy Longevity Professor of Epidemiology ( in the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center )
M. Claire Greene is an Assistant Professor in the Program on Forced Migration and Health within the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health. Dr. Greene's research focuses on improving the effectiveness and implementation of mental health and substance use interventions in humanitarian emergencies. Her research examines models of integrating mental health and psychosocial support across sectors as a strategy to improve the accessibility, relevance, effectiveness, and sustainability of these interventions. Examples include integrating mental health intervention components into programs aimed to reduce intimate partner violence, strengthen community connectedness and safety, and alleviate displaced and host community tensions and xenophobia in humanitarian settings. At Mailman, Dr. Greene teaches Investigative Methods in Complex Emergencies, a course focused on how to collect and effectively use data to inform programming and policy in humanitarian settings. Dr. Greene received her PhD in Public Mental Health and Substance Use Epidemiology from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and an MPH in Chronic Disease Epidemiology and Global Health from Yale School of Public Health.