Dr. Shervin Assari is a health equity adviser to Partnership to End Addiction. He is also a social epidemiologist and health disparities researcher specializing in racial and ethnic inequalities in behavioral health. His work examines how structural racism and social determinants of health drive disparities in outcomes among marginalized populations. His theory Marginalization-Related Diminished Returns (MDRs) explains why substance use and other adverse outcomes persist at unexpectedly high rates among middle-class Black, Latino, Asian American, Native American, LGBTQ+, and immigrant populations. Dr. Assari's research further demonstrates that socioeconomic resources, such as education and income, provide fewer health and well-being benefits to minoritized groups compared to US-born Whites. With over 500 publications and international recognition, Dr. Assari’s work spans mental health, aging, and substance use. He is deeply committed to advancing health equity through policy-relevant research and mentoring underrepresented scholars, particularly at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) such as Charles R. Drew University and Morgan State University. Dr. Assari is a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM), the Society of Behavioral Medicine (SBM), the American Academy of Health Behavior (AAHB), and the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research (ABMR), reflecting his distinguished contributions to the fields of health disparities and behavioral health. He is an associate professor of internal medicine and public health at Charles R. Drew University.
Shervin Assari | Profiles RNSDr. Deepa Camenga is an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine, Pediatrics, and Public Health at the Yale Schools of Medicine and Public Health. Dr. Camenga completed her medical education and residency at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, followed by a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship in Health Services Research at Yale Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program. She is a Physician-Scientist board-certified in pediatrics and addiction medicine with research expertise in adolescent substance use, mixed methods (survey design and implementation, qualitative methodologies), and the study of knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs around a variety of health behaviors relevant to adolescent health. She has led and participated in multiple NIH-funded studies examining various aspects of adolescent substance use, including cannabis use. Dr. Camenga is also the Chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Substance Use and Prevention, which produces guidance for pediatricians, state and federal government, and other stakeholders to reduce harm from substance use.
Diana Fishbein, PhD, is a senior research scientist at the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute. She is also a professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies and the director of the Program of Translational Research on Adversity and Neurodevelopment at Pennsylvania State University. She holds positions as adjunct professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of California, Irvine, as well as a faculty subcontractor at Georgetown University, and a guest researcher at the National Institute on Drug Abuse Intramural Research Program. Her studies use transdisciplinary methods and a developmental approach to understanding interactions between neurobiological processes and environmental factors. Her research supports the premise that underlying neurobiological mechanisms interact with the quality of our psychosocial experiences and environmental contexts to alter trajectories either toward or away from risk behaviors. Her work further suggests that compensatory mechanisms can be strengthened with the appropriate psychosocial and environmental manipulations. She has published extensively and serves in an advisory capacity for federal and state government bodies as well as several universities and organizations. Given the inherent translational nature of this research, she founded and directs the National Prevention Science Coalition to Improve Lives (NPSC), a national organization dedicated to the transfer of knowledge from the basic sciences to practices in real-world settings and public health policies. She is the cofounder, along with Partnership to End Addiction researchers of the Consortium to Advance Prevention Solutions to the Opioid Crisis (CAPSOC).
Dr. Hill is director of the Prevention Science Program (formerly Problem Behavior and Positive Youth Development), Co-Principal Investigator of the Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development registry, and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Program includes The Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development, and a newly funded Center for Resilience and Well-Being, which is a resource center for trauma-focused school-based services in the Rocky Mountain region. Dr. Hill’s work over the last thirty years has focused on understanding two questions: What are optimal family, peer, school and community environments that encourage healthy youth and adult development? And how do we work with communities to make this happen? Prior to CU Boulder, he worked for 23 years at the University of Washington as a professor and prevention scientist where he sought to understand the development and consequences of prosocial outcomes as well as antisocial behaviors such as drug use and dependence, crime, and gang membership, and the mechanisms of continuity and discontinuity in these behaviors across generations. In addition, his work has focused on developing and testing interventions to shape these outcomes, and on working with communities to improve youth development and to break intergenerational cycles of problem behavior.
Margaret Kuklinski is the Director of the Social Development Research Group and a Social Work Endowed Associate Professor in Prevention. Dr. Kuklinski’s research and intervention efforts are at the intersection of prevention science and health economics. Her work aims to promote positive developmental outcomes by demonstrating the long-term impact of effective community-based and family-focused intervention, identifying the level of investment needed to improve health and wellbeing through effective intervention, and building policy support for preventive interventions by demonstrating their benefits and costs. Kuklinski is director of the School’s Social Development Research Group where she supports efforts to disseminate interventions to communities, families and agencies. For more than a decade, she has led or contributed to studies that promote healthy behaviors and positive development. She serves as Acting Director for the Center for Communities That Care and co-principal investigator on the longitudinal evaluation of the Communities That Care prevention system which has demonstrated impact on preventing drug use and antisocial behavior from adolescence into young adulthood. She is also co-principal investigator on a multisite trial testing the feasibility and effectiveness of implementing Guiding Good Choices, a prevention program for parents of adolescents, in three regionally and socioeconomically diverse healthcare systems. She currently co-chairs the Health Economics Working Group for a set of projects funded under NIDA’s HEAL Prevention Initiative aimed at preventing opioid misuse in adolescents and young adults. As a health economist, Kuklinski has been involved in national efforts, conducted under the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine as well as the Society for Prevention Research, to establish best practices for cost, benefit-cost and cost-effectiveness analysis of interventions for children, youth, and families. She routinely consults and lectures on health economics and prevention science, and is an elected board member of the Society for Prevention Research.
Dr. Brandie Pugh is an Assistant Professor at West Virginia University in the fields of Sociology and Criminology. She previously served as an Assistant Professor at St. John’s University in New York City. She graduated with honors from Ohio University in 2012 with bachelor’s degrees in both Psychology and Criminology and received her doctorate in Sociology in August 2022 from the University of Delaware. Her dissertation explored how research on rape and rape prevention efforts are influenced by, and often confined to, parameters grounded in the history of the feminist movement of the 1970s. Her recent and ongoing research is connected to a plethora of interrelated topics that involve consent and coercion, gender harassment, trauma informed gynecological care, and cross-national experiences of violence, to name a few. Brandie also engages in another line of inquiry associated with parental influence on youth substance use and involvement in sexual violence prevention. Dr. Pugh is a prior employee of and current statistical consultant on prevention policy research for Partnership to End Addiction.
Stacy Sterling, DrPH, MSW, MPH, is a senior research scientist with the Division of Research and co-directs its Center for Addiction and Mental Health Research. She is part of DOR’s Drug and Alcohol Research Team (DART) and its Behavioral Health Research Initiative. Her research interests include developing systems for implementing evidence-based, integrated, behavioral health services into primary care, adolescent behavioral health prevention and early intervention, and alcohol and drug and mental health treatment outcomes and access. Dr. Sterling is a standing member of the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Addiction (NIAAA) Clinical, Treatment and Health Services Research study section. She is principal investigator of a study funded by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation to develop predictive models for adolescent substance use problem development, and of studies funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Center for Substance Abuse Treatment of adolescents in drug and alcohol treatment in Kaiser Permanente. She is the Kaiser Permanente Principal Investigator of multiple studies including: a trial funded by the Hilton Foundation of single vs. multisession screening, brief intervention and referral to treatment (SBIRT) for adolescents and parents in pediatric primary care; a NIAAA adolescent SBIRT trial in pediatric primary care; an NIAAA trial of an innovative alcohol telemedicine consultation intervention, studies of the implementation and outcomes of large-scale alcohol screening and brief intervention, and an NIAAA survey of pediatrician attitudes toward and practices of adolescent behavioral-health risk screening and intervention. Dr. Sterling was co-investigator of a cluster-randomized trial of SBIRT for unhealthy alcohol use in adult medicine in Kaiser Permanente Northern California. She co-authored a widely disseminated issue brief, “Reducing Risky Alcohol Use: What Health Care Systems Can Do” and has developed nationally disseminated educational materials including NIAAA’s “The Healthcare Professional’s Core Resource on Alcohol, ‘Promote Practice Change: Take Manageable Steps Toward Better Care’.” Dr. Sterling is the KPNC Training Director for an innovative hybrid National Institute of Mental Health T32 fellowship program and was recognized with DOR’s Excellence in Mentoring Award. She received her doctoral training at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health, and her master’s degrees in Public Health and Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley.
