Core CAPES Faculty

I am the Harold L. Jurist ’61 and Heather E. Jurist Dean’s Professor of Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. My expertise is in mobile health and Artificial Intelligence methods for medical image analysis and passive smartphone sensing of user health. I have researched and developed Moodable, a smartphone system that can detect depression and suicide ideation from passively collected smartphone logs combined with voice snippets actively provided by subjects. I also have developed a mobile application for patients with advanced diabetes, which automatically analyzes the healing progress of foot ulcers from smartphone images and helps visiting nurses manage patients’ conditions at home, funded by NIH/NSF. This app creates wound image analysis algorithms using machine and deep learning. I am also on a DARPA-funded project analyzing smartphone biomarkers for Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and infectious diseases including Covid-19 and influenza. I have worked on a range of other mobile applications including those for detecting intoxication and impairment by marijuana from a smartphone user’s gait, for obesity problem solving counseling, and for administering exercise as a drug to mitigate alcohol addiction. 

I am a Professor of Biostatistics in the Population and Quantitative Health Sciences Department at UMass Chan Medical School and Co-Lead of the Design, Data, and Analysis Unit. I have been involved in medical research studies, especially clinical trials, for over 45 years and have been the PI/Director of 38 Data Coordinating Centers, funded both by NIH and by industry. My role in CAPES is, 1) to provide insight and advice in the study design, 2) to provide oversight and direction of data management and curation of data as Co-Lead (in collaboration with Dr. Chengwu Yang) of the Design, Data, and Analysis Unit; and (3) to collaborate with other faculty biostatisticians in the design of analysis approaches for the CAPES projects. My previous studies have included a broad spectrum of studies, including those studying depression and anxiety in addition to working with Dr. Boudreaux on studies of suicidality. In more general terms, my background in clinical trials includes the design, development, and oversight of trial infrastructure, including data management, randomization/drug inventory management systems, monitoring of data through statistical process control approaches, analysis, and developing the tables, listings, and figures for publications.

I am the leader of the Economic Evaluation Unit of the Methods Core for CAPES. I am an epidemiologist and health services researcher in the ForHealth Consulting division of UMass Chan Medical School. I am an Assistant Professor with the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences at UMass Chan Medical School.  I am a trained researcher with a doctoral degree in psychiatric epidemiology and currently Co-Investigator on four National Institute of Health-funded studies in suicide prevention, leading the cost-effectiveness analyses of the suicide risk screening and management interventions. In addition to my contribution to these studies, my research has focused on the areas of health services research, cost of care, and cost effectiveness analysis for hepatitis C virus and substance use disorders. I have developed expertise in study design and analysis of medical claims and electronic medical record data using a variety of methodological approaches, including survival analysis, time series analysis, hierarchical regression, and decision analysis.

I am a clinical psychologist, Collaborator on CAPES and Co-Lead of the CATS-PC Exploratory Project. I have diverse clinical experience in a variety of medical settings, including the emergency department (ED), primary care, and hospital- based specialty clinics. My current research program focuses on creating innovative, evidence-based strategies for implementing integrated behavioral health into diverse medical settings, with a focus on leveraging technology to improve detection and treatment of substance abuse and suicide risk. I completed an NCI-funded fellowship in implementation science and integrated behavioral health to enable a career evaluating barriers to and methods for improving patient access to behavioral healthcare, including telehealth delivered interventions and care transitions. I have been a Co-I on three NIH-funded SBIR/STTR grants that have built, studied, and deployed technologies to improve the assessment and management of a range of behavioral health domains, including suicide. My combined unique research and clinical experiences have given me insight into the challenges and opportunities associated with targeting mental health in clinical settings.

I am a clinical psychologist and Co-Project Lead for the Leveraging “Early Mental Health Uncovering©” Risk for Suicide (LEMURS) project within CAPES. I am an associate professor and director of clinical training at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I am dedicated to better understanding, predicting, and ultimately reducing self-injurious behaviors. I have (1) content expertise in self-injurious behaviors, (2) proficiency in multi-method paradigms to permit versatility in rigorous tests of CAPES’ tools, and (3) experience conducting randomized clinical trials. I have been an investigator in over 6 federally funded (NSF, NIH, and Canadian Institutes of Health Research) studies of the assessment and treatment of self-injurious behaviors across outpatient and emergency department-recruited samples. I am passionate about compassionate, evidence-based assessment and care for patients who engage in self-destructive behaviors. Ultimately, I hope that this work reduces suicide and aids individuals in developing lives worth living.

I am a Professor of Information Systems at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), specializing in designing user-centered technologies that support decision-making. I employ eye-tracking technology to assess user engagement with various types of visual content, including embedded content on organizational websites and complex information in medical decision aids. My research extends beyond design evaluation; it also explores the use of eye movement data as a biomarker of experience. I have developed a system that automatically detects cognitive load from eye movements. In a recent project, I am working on designing a clinician support system that utilizes eye movements as a biomarker for health symptoms such as chronic pain and anxiety.

I am the lead for the Admin Core Business Development Unit for CAPES, which is dedicated to helping investigators focus on technology transfer and commercialization. I am an Associate Professor in the Manning School of Business at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. I am a specialist in strategic management and international business and focus on innovation and entrepreneurship. My core research agenda is focused on scholarship engagement involving the intersection between business and science. My interdisciplinary research expertise led me to create the Biotech East training program, which trains PhD students, graduate students, and postdocs in health, science, and medical programs that want to transition into jobs in biotech, med-tech, and pharmaceuticals. I am the business unit PI and Co-Director of the Training and Dissemination Core for the NIH-sponsored Center for Advancing Point of Care Technologies (CAPCaT). The goal of the program is to train program participants in the issues related to point-of-care (POC) and home-based technologies and to develop and disseminate current knowledge about these technologies to different stakeholders including patients, families/caregivers, medical professionals, community health leaders, policy makers, and investors. I am also the business unit co-PI for the NIH-sponsored UMass Lowell Innovative Fellows Training program (LIFT), an entrepreneurship l program for early-career scientists working in biotech and medtech.

I co-lead the Methods Core Person-Centered Design Unit of CAPES and collaborate on the JASPR/ADAPT project. I am an internist, data scientist, researcher, and Chief of the Division of Health Informatics and Implementation Science in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences. My research interests include diabetes self-management and health behavior promotion through technology and health services delivery redesign. I have extensive experience in the design, development, and implementation of mobile health (mHealth) solutions targeting diverse patient populations with limited access to healthcare services. My research group has involved health coaching weight-management interventions, 2-way text messaging support, multimedia education, mobile app development and implementation, and physiologic measures including wearables for real-time engagement.  

I am a Professor of Operations and Industrial Engineering in the Business School at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). My research has focused on applying industrial engineering methods and models to address issues in healthcare delivery.  My work has addressed three broad aims within this domain: (1) using quality improvement methods such as Lean and applying work system frameworks to support more effective implementation, (2) improving operational decision-making by developing quantitative models that incorporate dynamics, risk, and uncertainty, and (3) harnessing opportunities created by information technologies to improve workflow and care delivery. I am a Co-I on a NIMH-funded project led by Dr. Boudreaux focused on deriving a clinical decision rule to support universal risk detection and optimize patient care workflow in adult emergency department patients. Previously, I worked with Dr. Boudreaux on the ED-SAFE 2 study that explores using lean and continuous improvement as an implementation strategy for universal screening for suicide and a safety planning intervention.

I am the project lead for the Dissemination and Community Engagement (DanCE) unit of CAPES. I am a primarily NIH-funded Assistant Professor at UMass Chan Medical School in the Departments of Psychiatry and Emergency Medicine and within the Implementation Science and Practice Advances Research Center (iSPARC). I am Lead of a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award from NIAAA, which involves designing, refining, and evaluating a novel avatar-guided technology-based intervention for emerging adults with alcohol use problems and suicidal thoughts, delivered within the emergency department. The avatar intervention was designed using feedback from clinical experts, emergency department experts, emerging adults with lived experiences, and with consultation from the iSPARC Young Adult Advisory Board. I am a Collaborator n a NIDA-funded R24 led by Kristyn Zajac called the Collaborative Hub for Emerging Adult Recovery Research and am involved with community participatory methods with young adults and peer support specialists with lived experience with opioid use disorder. I am also a CAPES Emerging Scholar and meet criteria for being an under-represented person in biomedical research because of my socio-economic background, so particularly benefit from the faculty development programs offered through CAPES. 

I am a consultant and collaborator on the Dissemination and Community Engagement Unit (DanCE). I am an affiliate in Emergency Medicine and Psychiatry at the UMass Chan Medical School. My research focuses on the detection and treatment of suicide risk in health care settings, with an emphasis on technology-facilitated implementation and stakeholder engagement. I have tested the acceptability and feasibility of digital suicide assessment and safety planning tools within acute care settings, and in implementing suicide risk screening protocols as part of the ED-SAFE-2 study. 

I am a lead faculty statistician of the Center for Accelerating Practices to End Suicide through Technology Translation (CAPES, P50) and serve as an assistant professor of biostatistics at the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences (PQHS) at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. I received a PhD in statistics from the University of Georgian in 2013 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Transdisciplinary Research on Energetics and Cancer (TREC, NIH NCI U54) at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. At the University of Arkansas (2016-21), I served as an assistant professor and co-investigator on numerous interdisciplinary agricultural projects funded by USDA, covering topics such as plant and livestock diseases, crop yield, plant injury, rice genetics, nutrition, water quality, and food security. This early academic path significantly broadened my research spectrum—from human to nonhuman subjects and from traditional experimental design to pragmatic trials—equipping me as well-rounded statistician in public health, agricultural sciences and medical research. My primary research area in statistics is statistical inference for high-dimension, low-sample size data. I am passionate about achieving two goals throughout my career: deepening my statistical research and providing the most useful statistical theory to a broader audience through effective collaboration. My recent research includes analyzing EHR data to characterize cancer comorbidities and integrating clinical and socio-environmental strategies to improve survivors' quality of life. In CAPES, I am a co-lead of Methods Core (with Drs. Kiefe, Agu) and data analysis unit (with Dr. Barton). My role includes supervising the CREID (Complementary Randomized Controlled Trial and Real-world Study for Efficacy, Effectiveness, and Implementation Design) component within JASPR, a signature project of CAPES.

I am Professor and Chief of the Division of Preventive and Behavioral Medicine in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences. As of Fall 2024, I am the holder of the Barbara Helen Smith Chair in Preventive and Behavioral Medicine. I am a recognized leader in chronic disease prevention and control research, and in implementation science and community engagement research. My research addresses the role of contextual factors, including the built environment, community characteristics, systems factors and social relationships of health and health behaviors. I serve as Co-Director of the UMass Worcester Prevention Research Center, Director of the Community Engagement Core of the UMass Center for Clinical and Translational Science and Co-Principal Investigator of the CDC funded Physical Activity Policy Research and Evaluation Network. I’m a dedicated mentor and educator. I serve as co-Director of an NCI-funded post-doctoral training program in implementation science and as co-Director of an NHLBI-funded institutional K12 program in implementation science.

I am Co-Lead of the ADAPT exploratory project within CAPES. I am a data scientist trained in computer science and artificial intelligence (AI), specifically focusing on natural language processing and machine learning. My research focuses on exploiting advanced computational models to analyze heterogeneous and complex electronic health records (EHRs) data for healthcare data mining, predictive modeling, and preventative data analytics. I have successfully applied traditional machine learning and deep learning techniques, including transfer learning, multi-task learning, hierarchical learning, to transform both structured and unstructured clinical data towards improving patient care and enhancing clinical decision support systems.  As a leading data scientist on suicide research projects, I have led two funded supplement grants to explore natural language processing and machine learning for suicidal encounter identification and suicide risk prediction using EHR data. I have also been actively engaged in the OHDSI common data model community on prediction modeling and health equity research. ADAPT aims to assess and adapt machine learning-based suicide risk prediction algorithms regarding the generalizability and transferability when translated to different healthcare contexts. 

I am the Director of the Center for Integrated Primary Care and a Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at UMass Chan Medical School. I am a clinician, educator, researcher, and consultant specializing in the integration of behavioral health and primary care services. I maintain a clinical practice embedded in the Barre Family Health Center, a rural family medicine residency practice in Massachusetts. I am a member of the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers and provide training in Motivational Interviewing to healthcare providers.

I am lead of the ELSI Unit within CAPES. I am a professor with the UC San Diego Design Lab and the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science. I direct the UC San Diego Research Ethics Program and the ReCODE Health center — both provide education and consultation services. Our ReCODE Health group also conducts empirical research to guide ethical practices in health research that involves pervasive sensors, mobile apps, social media, and machine learning/artificial intelligence. I apply a human centered design approach to shape ethical research practices (e.g., risk assessment, informed consent, return of results), which has led to development of decision support tools (see: Digital Health Checklist and Framework and Connected and Open Research Ethics platform). Publications related to my work are accessible: https://escholarship.org/uc/recodehealth_publications.

I am Lead of the Education and Scientific Development Unit of CAPES. am a doctoral trained epidemiologist with expertise in pharmaceutical and chronic disease epidemiology, “big data” analytics, and collaborative research integrating machine learning enabled methodology. My research has utilized administrative claims data, electronic health records data (including machine learning methods for text abstraction), and other large-scale data resources. I have developed collaborative teams to implement data science technologies, including natural language processing, to efficiently and validly abstract exposure and outcome data from the free text notes of electronic medical record systems.  I oversee the Pilot Project funding program, patterned after the NIH peer review process, to solicit, review, and award 10 R03-like pilot studies that support the mission of CAPES, focus on synergy between technologies and Faculty, and gather data to be leveraged for new grant submissions.

I am a Professor of Psychiatry at University of San Diego and Co-Lead of the Ethics Unit. I have been actively conducting clinical research for over 25 years, and have served as Lead as well as Collaborator on numerous NIH funded and other funded grants for empirical studies related to issues in research ethics, including informed consent, decision making capacity, and participant  perspectives on research participation. I have been active in teaching trainees research ethics through the UC San Diego Research Ethics Program since 2022 (Director: Dr. Nebeker). I served on the UC San Diego Biomedical Institutional Review Board (IRB) from 2002–2015, and I served as Study section Chair for the NIH Center for Scientific Review Societal and Ethical Issues in Research Study section from 2013–2015. I also served on the American Psychological Association, Committee on Human Research from 2014–2017.

I am co-lead of the Implementation Science Unit and Lead of the Evaluation Unit of CAPES. I am a licensed clinical psychologist and an Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. My research uses implementation science techniques to improve access to care for individuals with legal involvement and struggling with substance use and mental health disorders. My work aims to improve collaboration, and in turn, treatment engagement and retention for at- risk individuals, between healthcare and legal systems by using empirically driven approaches. I am the recipient of a National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) K23 Career Development Award and I serve as the co-Investigator of a NIDA-funded UG1 center grant to examine the state-wide implementation of Medications for Opioid Use Disorders in jails. I am the mPI of a NIDA UC2 capacity building core that provides research training for junior investigators, clinicians, and criminal legal scholars in correctional health settings. I am excited to bring my experience working at the intersection of health and correctional systems, implementation science, and evaluations to advance the aims of CAPES.

I am the Co-Lead of the CAPES Economic Evaluation Unit. As a health services researcher with implementation science training, my work focuses on developing and replicating evidence based and informed interventions to improve access to and the quality of health care services for vulnerable populations, including adults and youth living with HIV, cis and transgender women, immigrants, and people experiencing homelessness. I am specifically interested in community-engaged, multilevel interventions that strengthen our health care workforce to address the social determinants of health and deliver care that is cost-effective and reduces inequities. I use implementation science frameworks to study the integration of non-clinical community health workers (CHWs), including peer/patient navigators on health care teams and the development, implementation, and evaluation of policies to enhance organizational capacity to deliver culturally relevant, patient centered care. I have developed and tested training curricula for supervisors, CHWs and peers on the impact on team coordination, communication, and partnerships. I conduct cost and cost-effectiveness analyses of these interventions in single and multisite settings to provide information for adaptation to and scaling to other health care settings. I have implemented and evaluated models of care that address the social determinants of health for people with HIV. Thus, I have experience with economic evaluations and implementation science relevant to CAPES.

I am Professor and Executive Vice Chair for Clinical Operations and Education in the Department of Emergency Medicine at UMass Chan Medical School. I recently stepped down from serving as the founding Director of the Richard V. Aghababian Emergency Medicine Leadership and Administrative Fellowship at UMass Chan Medical School after serving for over a decade in that role. I completed Emergency Medicine residency training at Detroit Receiving Hospital/Wayne State University School of Medicine, where I also served as Chief Resident, and I have completed two fellowships - one in Medical Simulation Research and Curriculum Design at Stanford University School of Medicine and the second in Emergency Department and Hospital Administration at the Detroit Medical Center/Wayne State University. I am active in educational advancement and original research, with interests in implementation science, quality/patient safety, ED/hospital operations and curriculum design and development, and I have and continue to serve in numerous leadership roles for regional and national professional organizations.  

I am Co-Lead on the ADAPT project of CAPES. I am the Irving S. and Betty Brudnick Endowed Chair, Professor of Psychiatry, and Psychiatry Department Vice Chair for Research at the UMass Chan Medical School and its clinical partner, UMass Memorial Medical Center, Worcester, Massachusetts. I have spent more than 40 years in both clinical and research settings diagnosing and treating patients with difficult to treat depressions such as psychotic depression and treatment resistant depression, which are associated with increased rates of suicide, and studying the diagnostic challenges, biology, course, and treatment of these serious disorders. I am best suited to Co-Lead CAPES projects, given my expertise and long-standing research in implementing novel treatment paradigms within outpatient healthcare settings.

I am the William Smith Dean's Professor, Computer Science and Founding Head of Data Science and of Artificial Intelligence at WPI. I serve as a Co-Lead of the LEMURS project within CAPES. I am passionate about applying innovative data-driven technologies to accelerate the digital transformation of solving mental-health illnesses in healthcare settings. I have successfully led more than 55 extramural studies with well over $20 million in funding focused on data-intensive technology development for challenging data-centric application problems from mental health screening, adverse event detection, data modeling of infection spread, data integration for clinical decision making, machine learning for screening for ailments, and AI for electronic health record data. Specific to this CAPES center, I have developed mental health screening solutions using Artificial Intelligence and deep learning that leverage smartphone data including voice, text messages, GPS, and social media. My research resulted in the development of the EMU screening app, which in a CAPES project, we will deploy and study for its accelerated adoption as evidence-based screening solution of suicide ideation and behavior risk to support vulnerable communities in particular students on a college campus. 

I am a Professor of Information Systems at WPI, Co-Project Lead for the CATS-PC exploratory project and Co-Lead for the Methods Core Person-Centered Design Unit within CAPES. I am passionate about applying user centered design to develop engaging digital health solutions. My research focused on designing and implementing digital health interventions to support patients and clinicians managing chronic conditions. These digital interventions targeted suicide prevention, weight management, perinatal depression, chronic wound management, and substance use. I have worked on commercialization of digital health solutions and worked with small businesses who provide these services in NIH-funded Small Business Innovation Research/Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) grants. My expertise is in technology implementations, user-centered design and analytics in healthcare contexts. I am excited about the opportunities CAPES will facilitate in creating cost-effective, scalable technology-based solutions that save lives.

Collaborator on OHDSI Pilot Project, Collaborator in the Methods Core. I am the Chief Research Informatics Officer at UMass Chan Medical School and an Associate Professor in the Health Informatics and Implementation Science Division. I direct the Research Informatics Core, which caters to all clinical data and data science needs for research at UMass Chan. I am also responsible for overseeing the institution's strategic direction of research informatics infrastructure. My academic research focuses on developing and implementing population-based informatics initiatives. My work employs decision support systems, artificial intelligence, and implementation science to optimize the management of patient populations. Through this innovative research, my aim is to enhance patient care and outcomes by harnessing the power of technology and data-driven solutions. In the CAPES project, my goal is to ensure that the Research Informatics Core provides all necessary support, particularly by supplying the clinical data required for the JASPR project and facilitating the transfer of de-identified data from partner sites to UMass Chan for harmonization and analysis.