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Mehret Birru Talabi, M.D., Ph.D.
Dr. Mehret Birru Talabi is an assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology at the University of Pittsburgh and an Assistant Dean and Co-Director of the Medical Scientist Training Program at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. She also directs the Women’s and Reproductive Health Rheumatology Clinic at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Through her health services research and clinical work, Dr. Birru Talabi seeks to improve reproductive health care and outcomes for women with rheumatic diseases. She is also committed to mentorship and education and works to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion through her role at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
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Lisa Bowleg, Ph.D., M.A.
Dr. Lisa Bowleg is a professor of applied social psychology in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at The George Washington University, a Co-Director of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Core of the DC Center for AIDS Research, and the founder and President of the Intersectionality Training Institute.
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Luana Colloca, M.D., Ph.D., M.S.
Dr. Luana Colloca is an NIH-funded faculty member at the University of Maryland School of Nursing. Dr. Colloca holds an M.D., a Ph.D. in neuroscience, and a master’s degree in bioethics. She has completed postdoctoral training at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, and a senior research fellowship at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Over the last two decades, Dr. Colloca has conducted pioneering studies that have advanced scientific understanding of the psychoneurobiological bases of endogenous systems for pain modulation in humans, including the discovery that the vasopressin system is involved in the enhancement of placebo effects with a dimorphic effect. Currently, her team conducts basic and translational research on genomics of orofacial chronic pain, brain mechanisms of expectancy, observationally induced hypoalgesia, and immersive virtual reality (mechanisms and applications). As a result, Dr. Colloca has developed an international reputation as a leading scientist for advancing knowledge of the neurobiological mechanisms of descending pain modulation, placebo, and nocebo effects with an integrative approach that includes psychopharmacological, neurobiological, and behavioral approaches. Her research has been published in top-ranked international journals, including Biological Psychiatry, Pain, Nature Neuroscience, JAMA, The Lancet Neurology, Science, and The New England Journal of Medicine. The impact of her innovative work is clear from her outstanding publications, citation rate, and numerous invited lectures worldwide (more than 300). Her research has also been featured on National Geographic, New Scientist, The Washington Post, ScienceDaily, The Boston Globe, The New Yorker, Nature, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, News and World Reports, and USA TODAY. Dr. Colloca also has been honored with prestigious awards, including the 2016 Wall Patrick International Award for basic research on pain mechanisms by the International Association for Study of Pain.
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Kelly Endres, M.S.P.H.
Ms. Kelly Endres is a research associate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the Department of International Health. She completed her Master of Science in Public Health in the Global Disease Epidemiology and Control Program at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She has experience leading quantitative and qualitative analyses, project development and implementation, and data management. She has worked internationally in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Bangladesh, as well as with Native tribes in the United States. Ms. Endres is primarily interested in water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) intervention development and implementation and investigating WASH behavior change.
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Margaret Kuklinski, Ph.D.
Dr. Margaret Kuklinski is Endowed Associate Professor of Prevention in Social Work, Director of the Social Development Research Group, and Director of the Center for Communities That Care in the School of Social Work at the University of Washington. Her research and intervention efforts are at the intersection of prevention science—especially on healthy behaviors/positive development—and health economics. In her work, she aims to promote positive developmental outcomes among diverse populations by demonstrating the long-term impact, effectiveness, and economic benefits of community-based and family-focused interventions. As a health economist, she has helped set methodological standards for cost, benefit-cost, and cost-effectiveness analyses of interventions for children, youth, and families. Dr. Kuklinski has also led health economic studies of several community-based and family-focused preventive interventions, including Communities That Care, the Family Check-Up, First Step, First Step Next, and Promoting First Relationships. She currently co-chairs the Health Economics Working Group for a set of projects funded under the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s HEAL Prevention Initiative aimed at preventing opioid misuse in adolescents and young adults. Dr. Kuklinski is a board member for the Board on Children, Youth, and Families within the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and a former member of the board of the Society for Prevention Research. Dr. Kuklinski earned her Ph.D. in clinical and community psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in economics from Harvard University.
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Viorica Marian, Ph.D.
Dr. Viorica Marian is the Sundin Endowed Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders and professor of psychology at Northwestern University, where she directs the Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Laboratory. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University, master’s degrees from Cornell University and Emory University, and undergraduate degree from the University of Alaska. Dr. Marian’s research on the cognitive, neural, and linguistic consequences of bilingualism, multilingualism, and linguistic diversity has been disseminated in more than 200 publications. She is the author of the new popular science book The Power of Language, translated into 12 languages and counting.
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Sirada Rochanavibhata, Ph.D.
Dr. Sirada Rochanavibhata is a postdoctoral scholar in the Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Laboratory at Northwestern University. She received her Ph.D. and master’s degree in communication sciences and disorders from Northwestern University and her undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Rochanavibhata’s research examines cross-cultural and cross-linguistic language acquisition and cognitive development in monolingual and bilingual children and is supported by a Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development R21 Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant Award.
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Tamar Rubinstein, M.D., M.S.
Dr. Tamar Rubinstein is a pediatric rheumatologist at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore and an assistant professor of pediatrics and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Dr. Rubinstein’s research focuses on improving mental health and disease outcomes in youth with lupus and has been funded by the Lupus Foundation of America, the Rheumatology Research Foundation, and the Childhood Arthritis and Rheumatology Research Alliance (CARRA)/Arthritis Foundation, and the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases. She is a co-leader of the CARRA Mental Health Workgroup, the Chair for the CARRA Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Advisory Committee, and serves on the Board of Directors for the American College of Rheumatology and the Medical-Scientific Advisory Committee for the Lupus Foundation of America.
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Lauren Schmitz, Ph.D., M.S.
Dr. Lauren Schmitz is an assistant professor at the Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research uses data and methods from economics, population health, and genomics to examine how social inequality erodes health at a molecular level and speeds up the aging process. To capture the dynamic interplay between our inner biology and our socioeconomic circumstances, her work marries cutting-edge genetic and epigenetic measures with data on the social environment from population-based longitudinal studies and randomized control trials. She primarily uses methods for learning causal effects from observational data with the aim of identifying policy targets that support quality of life and extend health span. Schmitz’s research has been funded by the National Institute on Aging, National Science Foundation, Center for Retirement Research, National Bureau of Economic Research, Russell Sage Foundation, and March of Dimes.
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Perry Sheffield, M.D., M.P.H.
Dr. Perry Sheffield is an associate professor in environmental medicine and public health and pediatrics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, where she co-leads the Children’s Environmental Health team. The team coordinates the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 2 Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit—which serves New Jersey, New York, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands—and the New York State Children’s Environmental Health Centers network (nyscheck.org). Dr. Sheffield’s research focuses on climate change–sensitive health outcomes, including current work exploring children’s vulnerability to heat.
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Brittany Smalls, Ph.D., M.H.S.A., M.S.H.Psych.
Dr. Brittany Smalls has earned a B.S. in anthropology, a Master’s in Health Services Administration, an M.S. in health psychology, and a Ph.D. in health and rehabilitation science with a concentration in health services research. Her research interests include health inequities, rural health, aging, and social determinants of health with a focus on cardiometabolic disorders. Most of her work has assessed the role of social determinants of health on diabetes health outcomes, specifically relating to social support and social networks. Dr. Smalls has also received funding to improve self-management among rural residents by leveraging implementation science to enhance community-based interventions.
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Emily Wakefield, Psy.D.
Dr. Emily Wakefield is a pediatric psychologist in the Division of Pain and Palliative Medicine and assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. She has dedicated her career to understanding and reducing the social and psychological burden of disease for children and adolescents with chronic pain and their families. Dr. Wakefield’s NIH-funded research in pediatric pain-related stigma is inspired by her clinical work with children and adolescents with chronic pain who frequently reported that others did not believe or thought they were making up their pain symptoms, which can be more challenging for marginalized youths with chronic pain. Dr. Wakefield has been recognized, including the Director’s Award for Sustained Superior Performance and the Clinical Excellence Leadership Postdoctoral Fellow Award. Dr. Wakefield received her Psy.D. in child psychology from the University of Hartford, completed her residency training at SUNY Upstate Medical University, and received her postdoctoral fellowship training at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center.
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Jennifer Woo, Ph.D., M.P.H.
Dr. Jennifer Woo is a postdoctoral Intramural Research Training Award fellow in the Epidemiology Branch at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and a 2023 Intramural Office of Autoimmune Diseases Research Fellow. She is a social epidemiologist who uses a life-course framework and social justice lens to study the effects of early-life trauma and neighborhood social environment on chronic disease risk, specifically breast cancer and systemic lupus erythematosus, as well as the underlying epigenetic pathways that may drive these relationships. Dr. Woo’s research also focuses on utilizing epidemiological and statistical methods to better measure psychosocial and socioeconomic exposures and to highlight and address health equity implications associated with limitations in study data. Dr. Woo is a co-leader of the Childhood Arthritis and Rheumatology Research Alliance (CARRA) Health Equity Research Workgroup and a member of the CARRA Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Advisory Committee.
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Sean Young, Ph.D.
Dr. Sean Young is a professor of emergency medicine (School of Medicine) and informatics (School of Information and Computer Sciences) at the University of California, Irvine. He is the Executive Director of the University of California Institute for Prediction Technology. Dr. Young was trained as a social psychologist and health services researcher, and his research is focused on studying digital health interventions and data science/artificial intelligence modeling approaches to improve integrative health in such areas as HIV, substance use, pain, sickle cell disease, mental health, and public safety/crime. He works with public health organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and local and state health departments, to design and implement digital tools to improve their surveillance and community outreach. He also studies the ethical and implementation issues involved with using technologies for integrative health, including the risks of stigmatization and misinformation. Outside of his academic research, he is an advisor and consultant on digital health products and digital marketing; the author of an International Best-Selling book, Stick With It (Harper Collins); and an advisory board member for the Division of Health and Medicine for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. He received his Ph.D. in psychology and master’s degree in health services research from Stanford University.
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