D.C. Health COMM Conference

Aria Crump, Sc.D. – Health Scientist Administrator

Dr. Crump joined the Prevention Research Branch in September of 2001. She received a Doctor of Science in Behavioral Sciences from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development where she participated in community- and school-based prevention research. Dr. Crump worked as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public and Community Health, University of Maryland at College Park, where she instructed students in health communications and minority health and conducted research as a part of a community-university health partnership. Her research interests include family-focused preventive interventions and prevention in racial/ethnic minority populations.  Her current program areas at NIDA focus on the prevention of drug abuse and HIV infection during late adolescence and the transition to adulthood, the prevention of prescription drug misuse, and on community-centered approaches to drug abuse risk-reduction in American Indian and Alaska Native populations.

Wen-ying Sylvia Chou, MD

Program Director in the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch, NCI

en-ying Sylvia Chou is Program Director in the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch at the NCI. She has interests in social media and health communication, patient-provider communication, and mixed methods health research. As a sociolinguist, she has expertise in qualitative analyses of patient-provider interactions and illness narratives. She also conducts research on the role of technologies and social/participatory media on health communication. In her role as a Program Director, she is leading the effort to develop funding initiatives to examine the changing communication landscape brought on by social media.  Dr. Chou came to the HCIRB from the Cancer Prevention Fellowship Program at the NCI. She holds a MS and PhD in linguistics from Georgetown University and a BA in Music from Santa Clara University, CA. She received a Master’s in Public Health from the Interdisciplinary MPH program at UC Berkeley.

Elizabeth M. Ginexi, Ph.D.
Health Scientist Administrator

Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi joined the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in November 2016 to focus on the application of innovative research methodologies, measurement, and analytic approaches to advance behavioral and social sciences research. Dr. Ginexi is an Applied Social Psychologist with expertise in family- and community-based etiology, prevention, and treatment research; policy interventions to target population-level health behavior; and quantitative analysis methods including: statistical methods for analyzing longitudinal, multi-level, and randomized intervention trial data, and computational modeling. Prior to joining OBSSR she served as a Program Director in the Tobacco Control Research Branch (TCRB) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) from 2010-2016 and as a Health Scientist Administrator in the Prevention Research Branch (PRB) at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) from 2003-2010. At NCI Dr. Ginexi was the Project Coordinator for the State and Community Tobacco Control (SCTC) Research initiative which was designed to address understudied aspects of tobacco control policy and media interventions. At NIDA, she directed the Transdisciplinary Prevention Research program portfolio along with prevention grant portfolios involving health communications research and methodology and measurement innovations. Prior to NIH Dr. Ginexi was a Senior Study Director at Westat, where she participated in the development and implementation of community-based drug abuse treatment and prevention evaluations funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). She began her career as a Research Scientist and Lecturer at the George Washington University, where she played a key role in data collection, data management, and analysis for longitudinal field studies involving family based mental health etiology studies and preventive interventions. She received her masters and doctoral degrees in Applied Social Psychology from the George Washington University and she completed postdoctoral training under two Public Health Service Grant National Research Service Awards, one through Children’s National Medical Center, and the other at the Center for Mental Health Policy at Vanderbilt University.

 

Liam O’Fallon, M.A.
Health Specialist

Since O’Fallon joined the Division of Extramural Research and Training in 1999, he has been actively involved in research programs at NIEHS that involve community participation. O’Fallon is the coordinator for the Partnerships for Environmental Public Health program at NIEHS, which integrates new and existing initiatives that involve communities and scientists working together on contemporary issues in environmental public health research. He administers the ARRA programs focused on capacity building, science education, and community-linked infrastructure. He coordinates the Community Outreach and Engagement Program (COEP), comprised of 20 Community Outreach and Engagement Cores across the country. He also is a member of the HHS Environmental Justice working group. Before coming to NIEHS in 1999, O’Fallon worked at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in the Office of International and Refugee Health, where he coordinated an interagency, binational working group addressing environmental health issues along the U.S.-Mexico border.

O’Fallon received his master’s degree in Latin American studies, specializing in medical anthropology and international health, from Tulane University in 1997.

Areas of Specialty: