Frederick Shic

Bill enjoys applying his clinical and technology backgrounds to address information management problems in clinical care, public health, and global health. He and his staff build information systems that are used both within academics, to understand and evaluate new approaches and methods, and outside of academics, to deliver real world value in health care.

He received his MD from the University of California, San Francisco, a Master of Health Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BSEE in Electrical Engineering from Tufts University. He completed a residency in Emergency Medicine at the University of Arizona, and the Royal Brisbane Hospital, Queensland, Australia, after which he joined the faculty in the Emergency Medicine at University of Washington. While at UW, he was awarded a F38 “mid-career” fellowship from the National Institutes of Health in Applied Medical Informatics. Currently he is a Professor in Health Informatics and Global Health, jointly appointed in UW’s Schools of Nursing, Medicine, and Public Health, and directs the UW Clinical Informatics Research Group.

Steve works on ethics, political philosophy and global environmental problems, especially as these concern duties to future generations. His recent work focuses on climate change, population growth, geoengineering, nuclear energy and the precautionary principle.

I run the TransYouth Project, the first large-scale, national, longitudinal study of transgender and gender nonconforming children’s development. We recruit transgender and gender nonconforming children when they are 3-12 to participate in this study, along with their families, and will follow their development and mental health for 20 years.

We hope to discover how gender diverse youth differ and are similar to other youth at key points throughout development, the medical, familial, and broader social systems that contribute to resilience as well as disparities in well-being amongst these youth, and to work to educate the broader public about transgender and gender nonconforming people throughout the world.

Judith N. Wasserheit, MD, MPH, has worked extensively at the interface of STI and HIV clinical-epidemiological research, programs and policy in the U.S. and globally. She is the Chair of the University of Washington’s Department of Global Health, and Professor of Global Health, Medicine, and Epidemiology. She was the founding chief of the NIH’s STD Research Branch; Director of the CDC’s STD Prevention Program, and Director of the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, the largest global clinical trials platform evaluating preventive HIV vaccines. Her research has included one of the first laparoscopic studies of pelvic inflammatory disease etiology conducted in the US, the first population-based study of the prevalence and etiologic spectrum of STDs among rural women in the Indian Subcontinent, and research on the interrelationships between STDs and contraceptive practices in other parts of the developing world, including Bangladesh, Egypt, and Indonesia. She has also worked in Colombia, Kenya, Thailand and Zambia. Her development of the concept of epidemiological synergy between HIV infection and other STDs has had a major influence on HIV prevention policy and programs around the world.

Dr. Wasserheit has broad experience working successfully with national and international agencies, governments, and colleagues on STD and HIV research, policy and programmatic issues. She has led or served on numerous World Health Organization and UNAIDS committees and advisory groups. Her honors include the U.S. DHHS Presidential Meritorious Rank Award, the Infectious Diseases Society of America’s Edward E. Kass Award, and the American Social Health Association’s Presidential Award. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, a Fellow in the American College of Physicians, a Paul Rogers Society Global Health Research Ambassador, a founding member and past chair of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health.

Population health research projects in which I am involved follow. All of these are under the auspices of the UW Health Promotion Research Center (http://depts.washington.edu/hprc/), a 30-year, competitively funded member of the CDC Prevention Research Centers Program.

HealthLinks Dissemination in Rural WA, Co-PIs: Peggy Hannon and Jeff Harris

We conduct research on interventions to promote nurturing early parent child relationships in families with infants birth to five that are living in adverse circumstances. Families may be experiencing adult mental health and substance use, poverty, immigration and refuge status, and/or child maltreatment and neglect.

Sarah Elwood and Victoria Lawson are collaborating on relational poverty research and teaching. Social science research on impoverishment, equity and well-being recognizes that questions of health can never be separated from questions about social, political and economic context. Our work understands poverty as more than just an economic marker and population as more than demographic categories. Instead, our work and members of the Relational Poverty Network analyze poverty as constituted by interlocking processes including socio-economic processes around the globe, cultural politics of representation, processes of racialization, gender, nationality and ability and processes of governing, norming – of making ‘common sense’.

Our own recent research focuses on poverty politics, as crucial to understanding population equity and questions of well-being/health. Poverty politics entail projects of government that identify problems, justify interventions, and inaugurate solutions that stabilize dominant forms of economic and political power AND politics that refuse existing orders of social (de)valuation (that rely on the categorization, exclusion, repression and criminalization of difference) through practices of illiberal embodiment and disidentification which rehumanize people outside of racial capitalist orders. We also study alliances across difference as potential sites for advancing unprecedented and creative challenges to impoverishment might emerge from solidarities across race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, and other axes of difference. A third strand of our work addresses epistemologies and methodologies of studying poverty. Our work begins from an epistemology of poverty that integrates multiple causal processes as they interrelate differentially across time and space. Our approach builds bridges between policymakers, researchers, and communities to build innovative concepts for poverty research.

Dr. Beverly Green is a family physician and associate investigator at Group Health and Group Health Research Institute. Her areas of interest include population based screening within organized health care and safety net settings, improving the care of chronic conditions such as hypertension, and leveraging technology to optimize the reach and effectiveness of evidence-based health care. She is also a Clinical Associate Professor in the University of Washington Medical School Department of Family Medicine.

Prof Cox is one of the lead investigators in an International Consortium put together with the aim of identifying the genetic basis of cleft lip/palate. Patients, and particularly families with multiple affected individuals, have been collected from the US, Australia, Netherlands, Colombia and the Philippines.

The project, currently supported by federal funding from Australia, has been conducting exome and whole-genome sequencing. New candidate genes are being assessed in Prof Cox’s laboratory through functional studies involving a combination of in vitro assays and mouse models.

Additional research in the Cox lab is focused on the molecular and developmental mechanisms causing facial clefts, the role of diet in mitigating the severity of presentation, and the role of ‘cleft’ genes in other dental phenotypes commonly seen in patients. We are interested in partnering with other clinicians and basic researchers with interests in clinical outcomes in the management of individuals with clefts or other craniofacial malformations, genetic testing, or basic epithelial biology.

Dr. McKinney received her doctorate in epidemiology from the University of Washington in 2006. Her research interests are focused on craniofacial, oral, and nutritional health in young children. She is based in the Division of Craniofacial Medicine in the Department of Pediatrics at the UW School of Medicine.

Dr. McKinney currently studies the unique intersection of oral clefts, maternal breast milk expression, infant feeding and global health. She spearheaded the development of the NIFTY cup – an infant feeding cup for infants with breastfeeding difficulties such as infants with oral clefts and preterm infants in low resource settings – with a team of multidisciplinary experts from Seattle Childrens, PATH, the University of Washington and Laerdal Global Health. Her global research collaborations involve partners in Thailand, India and Ghana.

Assistant Professor based at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, focusing on a variety of population health topics, including Neglected Tropical Diseases, Vector-borne, Zoonotoc and potentially pandemic pathogens

Suzinne Pak-Gorstein MD, MPH, PhD is Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics; Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Global Health; Co-Director of the Nutrition Think Tank for the Global Center for Integrated Health of Women, Adolescents and Children (WACh-NTT); and Co-Director of the Resident Education and Advocacy for Global Child Health-Kenya program (REACH-Kenya Pathway).

As a clinician-educator, Suzinne trains pediatric residents and graduate students, and is a course instructor and lecturer for UW undergraduate courses on the topics of global public health and global nutrition/food systems. Her main research and service interest is the provision of culturally sensitive and high-quality care for refugee children in the US with a focus on obesity, undernutrition, and caring for medically complex refugee children. She also has interests in program monitoring and evaluation in low-income country settings and has been involved with nutrition surveillance systems, national surveys, and establishment of health information systems in several countries including Indonesia, Laos, Nepal, and Bangladesh.

Suzinne is the Co-Chair of the Academic Pediatric Association’s Global Health Special Interest Group, liaison to the Coalition of Centres in Global Child Health (CCGCH), and active member of the American Academy of Pediatric’s Section on International Child Health. Suzinne participated in the design and implementation of the UW Pediatric Residency Global Health Pathway Program which is a bilateral exchange program that trains pediatric residents from Seattle and Nairobi to integrate population health concepts and approaches into pediatric service through community health assessments, advocacy, and stakeholder engagement. The Global Health Pathways program (now named REACH-Kenya) was bestowed the 2014 Academic Pediatric Association Teaching Program Award.

My main career focus has been on program implementation. I’m currently the PI for a PCORI-funded comparative effectiveness study involving low-income people with asthma between the ages of 5 and 75y, who are patients at either NeighborCare Health or Health Point. We are testing two interventions: a Community Health Worker who visits the patient’s home, and an enhanced clinic intervention. Most of this work is accomplished at King Country Health Department.

We’re using this project as pilot work to prepare a large (six-year) U01 proposal to NIH to test an integrated community-based pediatric asthma intervention to reduce disparities in health outcomes. If funded, the project would be run primarily through the King and Pierce County Heath Departments. 

I’m also the site PI of a large international implementation study funded by the European Commission, called Fresh Air 2020. http://www.theipcrg.org/freshair. UW is one of 14 funded centers around the world. The four target countries are Uganda, Kyrgyzstan, Greece, and Vietnam. In each of these developing countries, we are working to implement a variety of evidence based strategies to improve respiratory health (further detailed on website). I lead delivery of an online training and feedback program known as Spirometry 360, and the overall Implementation Science effort.

Since 2009, our evidence-based, 5-month online Spirometry 360 program has been delivered to over 300 primary care sites around the country, as well as to clinical sites in Australia, Holland Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, and Kenya, in addition to the countries mentioned in the FA 2020 project above.

Dr. Wade is an Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing & Health Studies at the University of Washington Bothell.

His scholarly work applies social and behavioral research methods to identify ways of improving public health interventions.

His primary focus is on new health technology assessment, particularly with respect to the integration of genomic information into health practice.

He has also conducted studies which explore methods for improving educational practices for future public health professionals.

Additionally, Dr. Wade has worked with community partners to address HIV prevention interventions, health literacy, and access to healthcare by underserved populations.