This research was conducted in 2011 and 2012 and evaluated by Sara Wakai, PhD, Assistant Professor-in-Residence and Elizabeth Schilling, PhD, Research Associate.
Evaluation Report - Year 1 and 2(report submitted to the Connecticut Dept. of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DHMAS), July 2012)
CHCI Results - Power Point Presentation - October 2012
Reducing Health Disparities in Hartford
A grant awarded in March 2011 from the Connecticut Health Foundation. Read more details about the project in UConn Today.
Suicide Prevention
IPHR conducted a three year evaluation (2007-2009) of the CT Youth Suicide Prevention Initiative in partnership with the CT Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DHMAS).
Dr. Aseltine was featured in a WTNH news story on Nov. 5, 2009 about the shortage of primary care physicians in CT.
Since 2005, The Center for Public Health and Health Policy (CPHHP) has provided methodological and statistical core research services for public health and applied health research through its Institute for Public Health Research (IPHR) at UConn.
The IPHR faculty and staff (see below), who are affiliated with CPHHP research, have expertise in all phases of quantitative and qualitative research, including:
experimental design
power analysis
data management
survey-based data collection methodologies
survey and questionnaire design
focus groups and qualitative interviewing
advanced statistical modeling
preparation of reports and peer-reviews publications
program evaluation
In addition, the core faculty and staff have a substantial amount of experience in community-based health research involving multiple stakeholders, and in successfully fielding intervention trials in community settings.
Robert H. Aseltine, Jr., PhD, directs public health research for the Center for Public Health and Health Policy and is a Professor in the Division of Behavioral Sciences and Community Health at the UConn Health Center. Dr. Aseltine is also Director of the Connecticut Health Information Network, an innovative, distributed network designed to promote the integration and sharing of health information collected and maintained by Connecticut's state agencies. Dr. Aseltine is a medical sociologist with expertise in quantitative research methods and statistics, particularly in designing large-scale population surveys and multi-site, community-based evaluations of preventive interventions. Dr. Aseltine recently directed a national evaluation of the efficacy of brief interventions for risky drinking in 14 academic emergency medical centers across the country. He has also directed multi-site evaluations of National Alcohol Screening Day involving 20 college and community sites across the US, and has conducted several multi-site studies of school-based prevention programs involving schools in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Georgia. Dr. Aseltine has substantial experience in analyzing data from multi-site, cluster-correlated study designs.
Dipak Dey, PhD, is Professor and Chair of the Department of Statistics and is a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Public Health Research at the of University of Connecticut. Dr. Dey's main research interest is development of statistical models for biostatics, bioinformatics and environmetrics problems. His research includes modeling survival, categorical, and spatio-temporal data. Application of his research includes geographic disease modeling for various types of cancer surveillance and cure, clustering and classification of genomes, as well as identification of biomarkers.
Ofer Harel, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics and is a Research Fellow in the Institute of Public Health Research at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Harel received his doctorate in statistics in 2003 from the Pennsylvania State University where he developed his methodological expertise in the areas of missing data techniques, diagnostic tests, longitudinal studies, Bayesian methods, sampling techniques, mixture models, and latent class analysis. Dr. Harel received post-doctoral training at the University of Washington, Department of Biostatistics, where he worked for the HSR&D Center of Excellence VA Puget Sound Healthcare System and the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center. He has been involved with a diverse set of health research projects related to Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, and alcohol and drug abuse prevention.
Jun Yan, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics and is a Research Fellow in the Institute of Public Health Research at the University of Connecticut. He received his Ph.D. in statistics from University of Wisconsin--Madison and his M.A. in Economics from the University of Miami. Dr. Yan's methodological research interests include survival analysis, clustered data analysis, spatial data analysis, spatial extremes, estimating functions, and statistical computing. He has been involved in a number of collaborative biomedical and public health research projects. In particular, he has worked with cystic fibrosis, alcoholism, cancer, depression, dental care, and other areas. Dr. Yan is committed to making his statistical methods available via open source software and has authored and is actively maintaining a collection of R packages in the public domain.
Ann Ferris, PhD, RD is Professor in the Department of Medicine at the UCONN Health Center and is Senior Research Fellow in the Institute for Public Health Research. She also holds appointments as Professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Connecticut-Storrs, and in the Department of Community Medicine and Health Care in the School of Medicine. Dr. Ferris has considerable experience and expertise in community-based participatory research and community engagement in health care delivery and research. Dr. Ferris has served as principal investigator on numerous community nutrition research projects, directed multi-disciplinary program and research groups in Hartford and other communities. Dr. Ferris is one of the founding directors of the interdisciplinary Center for Public Health and Health Policy at the University of Connecticut, the Urban Health Partnership, and the Doctoral Programs in Public Health. She also serves as the Community Engagement Program Director for the Clinical Translational Science Award Planning group.
Sara Wakai, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor-in-Residence in the Department of Medicine at the University of Connecticut Health Center. Dr. Wakai has designed and conducted several evaluations on programs related to public health. She is currently conducting an evaluation to identify barriers, incentives and best practices for implementing environmentally preferable products among custodial workers at state agencies. She is the evaluator for two DMHAS funded state initiative: Connecticut Healthy Campus Initiative (to reduce underage and binge drinking on college campuses across Connecticut) and the Connecticut Campus Suicide Prevention Initiative. She is conducting the evaluation for the educational component of the Hartford Neighborhood Healthy Homes project, a HUD funded-project. Dr. Wakai has also conducted research and evaluation on mental health within correctional facilities.
Elizabeth Schilling, PhD, is a Research Associate at the UCONN Health Center and is lead analyst at the Institute for Public Health Research. Dr. Schilling is a clinical psychologist with an MS in Biostatistics, and has expertise in advanced statistical analysis. She has analyzed and managed data from a wide range of studies including multi-site interventions, longitudinal outcome studies, and large surveys. Dr. Schilling's main interests are focused on the mental health of adolescents and young adults, as well as the statistical methodology used to evaluate preventive interventions.
Center for Public Health and Health Policy
99 Ash Street, 2nd Floor; MC 7160
East Hartford, Connecticut 06108
Phone: 860-282-8525; Fax: 860-282-8514 publichealth@uconn.edu
