Personal Statement
As a practicing psychiatrist and health services researcher, I seek to improve mental health services in medical settings, especially among underserved populations. I work with colleagues in a wide array of disciplines (medical, public health, engineering and others) to develop new ways to increase the reach of evidence-based mental health services using technology-enabled service models to leverage limited specialty mental health expertise. I have a strong interest in using consumer technologies to empower patients, improve communication with providers, and provide targeted treatment.
Personal Statement
I am a mixed methods health services researcher and health economist with a PhD in population health and background in community-based participatory research and community-engaged research. I enjoy working with partners in clinic and community settings to develop scalable programs to improve mental health services and community well-being. Such programs may involve a diverse workforce with varying levels of mental health training and experience, including lay health workers. My interest in technology focuses on finding efficiencies and the appropriate balance of technology and face-to-face encounters to support patient care and staff training/support in such programs.
Personal Statement
My primary interest is on determining how behavioral technologies can be used to improve alcohol and drug abuse outcomes for those suffering from addiction health disparities. Behavioral technologies are non-talk therapy approaches to addiction treatment, such as motivational incentives where we provide rewards for people who abstain from or reduce their drinking. This low-cost, strength based approach to addiction can be implemented in low-resources settings by non clinicians. In fact, our group is investigating how smartphones might be used to implement this treatment, allowing us to reach the millions of individuals suffering from alcohol problems worldwide.
My second research interest in evaluating the accuracy of alcohol biomarkers in addiction treatment settings. These include alcohol urine tests, such as ethyl glucuronide (EtG) and mobile phone linked Bluetooth breathalyzers. These tools allow us to accurately assess the success of alcohol treatments, as well as provide valuable research tools.
Importantly all of my research studies are conducted in collaboration with two communities that suffer disproportionately high rates of alcohol and drug misuse, 1) adults with severe mental illnesses, like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and 2) American Indians and Alaska Natives. My research team and I work closely with community partners who are providing addiction treatment to these populations with the goal of reducing the burden of alcohol and drug use in these communities.
Personal Statement
My research focuses on increasing the accessibility, efficiency, and effectiveness of community- and school-based interventions for children, adolescents, and families. I am particularly interested in (1) the identification and implementation of low-cost, high-yield practices – such as the use of measurement-based care – to reduce the gap between typical and optimal practice in schools; (2) development of individual- and organization-level implementation strategies to promote adoption and sustainment of evidence-based psychosocial interventions within a multi-tier systems of support (MTSS) framework; and (3) human-centered design (and redesign) of psychosocial and digital technologies to improve their implementability, accessibility, and effectiveness. I am the founder and Director of the School Mental Health Assessment, Research, and Training (SMART) Center, dually housed in UW’s School of Medicine and College of Education.
Personal Statement
I am a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine, and the Director of the Division of Population Health. I am also a Core Investigator at the HSR&D Center for Innovation for Veteran-Centered and Value-Driven Care at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System, and the Director of the VA Virtual Care QUERI Program.
For the last 35 years, my research has focused on access to care. I have published a framework for conceptualizing access to care in the digital age that incorporates virtual care technologies. I have conducted clinical trials to test the effectiveness of virtual care technologies to facilitate the delivery of evidence-based mental health services in rural primary care clinics. I have also conducted implementation trials to test the effectiveness of strategies to promote the uptake of virtual care technologies by primary care patients and providers. My research has been supported by NIMH, NIAAA, PCORI, and VA HSR/QUERI.
Personal Statement
My work focuses on education and training in the areas of suicide prevention and suicide care. Particular interests include supporting clinicians who have experienced the loss of a patient to suicide and building knowledge among health care professionals about cultural aspects of firearm ownership and use.
Personal Statement
Over the last 25 years, my work has focused on relationships between stress and health in several risk groups (spouse caregivers of persons with Alzheimer’s disease, medical students, psychiatric/medical outpatients/inpatients, air traffic controllers, and camp counselors). We have developed and/or revised measures of medical student stress, caregiver burden, patient anger/dyscontrol, process coping, appraisal, neuropsychological function and physician awareness of patient problems. These measures have been used by university researchers, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies in clinical trials, prisons, nursing homes/long term care, rehabilitation facilities, and public health organizations. These psychosocial and behavioral measures have been shown to predict and be predicted by physiological and cognitive measures. We have also focused on moderators of such relationships, such as gender, personality, and co-morbidities. We have used primarily multicohort long-term studies that allow for interactions between exposures to stressors, hard-wired vulnerabilities, and more temporal resources. We attempted to identify mechanisms that can be potentially altered to have long-term public health significance in persons under chronic stress. I have also attempted to isolate groups that are at high risk for negative outcomes. In a perfect world, interventions should be used to help all persons who have deleterious responses to stress, but society cannot afford this. For this reason, the identification of high risk groups is imperative for maximizing the effect of interventions.
My research program’s long range goal is to better understand the mechanisms by which chronic stress translates into physical, mental, or cognitive health problems. We are examining caregivers of spouses with AD and demographically-similar spouse non-caregivers across time and assessing the degree to which elevated depression, stress hormones, inflammation, and insulin resistance in caregivers predict cognitive decline in caregivers relative to non-caregivers. We are also attempting to replicate our earlier work that showed that chronic stress and chronic disease moderate each other’s physiological risks. For example, physiological dysregulation that is specific to a disease (e.g., metabolic syndrome with CHD, blood pressure reactivity with hypertension, and immune function with cancer history, HbA1c with diabetes) is exacerbated in caregivers with a chronic disease relative to non-caregivers with a chronic disease, but no such differences occur in caregivers versus non-caregivers without a chronic disease. Finally, we are examining a large cohort of older adults sampled from various U.S. communities in order to assess the influence of life stressors on long term cognitive function and potential mediators of such changes.
Personal Statement
Over the past 20 years, my research has focused on the genetics of schizophrenia and neurodegenerative disorders, particularly on the use of clinical phenotyping and innovative genomic technologies to elucidate the complex genetic architecture underlying schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). I served as the Director of the Geriatric Research, Education, and Clinical Center (GRECC) at the VA Puget Sound Health (VAPS) from 2011-2022, in order to focus on my research on Alzheimer’s Disease and related disorders. My current research interests are two-pronged: 1) develop machine learning models in VA’s vast electronic health records in order to assign ADRD probability scores in older Black and White Veterans; and 2) use mobile health devices to promote early diagnosis of dementia with Lewy bodies. In In these capacities, I direct multidisciplinary efforts to better understand the biology, genetics, etiology, prevention, and treatment of these disorders, and I provide clinical expertise for the differential diagnosis of neurodegenerative disorders and treatment of behavioral disturbances in dementias.
Personal Statement
Myra Parker, JD, PhD is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and Director of Seven Directions: A Center for Indigenous Public Health, based within the Center for the Study of Health and Risk Behaviors, University of Washington. She received her doctorate in Health Services at UW School of Public Health, and has been a member of the faculty since 2014.
Dr. Parker’s research and clinical interests include: (1) cultural adaptation of alcohol and drug interventions among American Indians and Alaska Natives (with a particular focus on tribal college drinking harm reduction), (2) development and testing of parenting interventions to support early childhood development in American Indian and Alaska Native communities, (3) co-morbidity of substance use with depression, suicide, trauma, and PTSD, (4) research capacity development, including ethical aspects of research, for tribal and urban Indian communities; and, (5) dissemination and translation of evidence-based prevention and intervention approaches at the individual, institutional, and community level, including policy development. She has worked with tribal and urban Indian communities across the United States on these topics.
