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Prevention Research

Related Faculty

Core Faculty

Leslie Adams, PhD
Assistant Professor
Adams’ research uses latent variable methods (e.g. factor analyses, latent class/profile analysis, etc.) to examine relationships between discrimination, psychiatric disorders, and health services utilization across sociodemographic groups. Adams also uses mixed methods and community-engaged study designs to explore mental health disparities in marginalized populations.

Michelle Carlson, PhD
Professor
Research interests: Older adults, cognitive health, neuropsychology, dementia prevention, and functional imaging.

Rebecca L. Fix, PhD
Assistant Professor
Research Interests: The prevention of discrimination and bias in the juvenile justice system; prevention of violent and sexual offending. Fix's training background is in clinical child psychology with a forensic focus.

Nicholas Ialongo, PhD
Professor
Research interests: School-based prevention interventions whose long term goals are educational and occupational success and the prevention of violence, substance abuse and mental disorders.

Philip Leaf, PhD
Professor
Research interests: Involved in research and practice related to the prevention of violence, mental illness, and substance abuse through the development and dissemination of effective prevention and promotion of assets and resilience in clinical settings, families and personal relationships, schools, and communities.

Elizabeth Letourneau, PhD
Professor
Research interests: development and evaluation of primary prevention programs aimed at potential child sexual abuse victims and perpetrators, their parents, and other adults involved in providing care or services to children and adolescents; evaluation of prevention and intervention policy and practice.

O. Lee McCabe, PhD
Associate Professor (part-time)
Research interests: Public health systems research; disaster-caused mental/behavioral health surge; training interventions for community resilience; competency-based psychological first aid; use of technology in translation/uptake of participatory mental health research; and pharmacotherapy of opiate addiction. McCabe hold a part-time Associate Professor appointment in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and a joint appointment in the Department of Mental Health.

Tamar Mendelson, PhD
Professor
Research interests: Mindfulness-based preventive interventions; prevention of mental health problems and promotion of resilience among underserved youth, adolescents, and emerging adults; school-based intervention trials; prevention of youth disconnection from school and the workforce; prevention of perinatal depression; cultural adaptation of interventions

Rashelle Musci, PhD
Associate Professor
Musci is a developmental methodologist with methods expertise in latent variable modeling, randomized control trials, integrating biological data into longitudinal models, and statistical data harmonization techniques. Her substantive focus is on prevention science and adolescent mental health, including suicide, externalizing behaviors, and substance use.

Reshmi Nair, PhD
Assistant Scientist at the Moore Center within the Department of Mental Health, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Nair is a Data Scientist and her primary research goals are directed towards managing, designing and analyzing research studies in collaboration with public health policy analysts, and development of statistical methodologies for modeling public health and violence related data. She leads the statistical team that supports the ongoing work at the Moore Center to evaluate policies and to validate the primary prevention efforts for child sexual abuse.

Jeanine Parisi, PhD
Associate Scientist
Research interests: Cognitive engagement, social engagement, leisure activities, cognitive interventions, activity interventions, memory, personality and aging, dementia prevention.

Elise Pas, PhD
Associate Scientist
Research interests: School-based interventions to promote positive behavioral, social, emotional, and academic outcomes; implementation, dissemination, and scale-up of evidence-based interventions and practices in schools; and teacher development as a means for improving implementation and student outcomes.

George W. Rebok, PhD
Professor
Research interests: Life-span developmental psychology, gerontology, prevention research, cognitive neuropsychology, cognitive training and intervention, cognitive aging and health, dementia

Adam P. Spira, PhD
Professor
Research interests: sleep disorders, aging, cognitive decline, depression, anxiety, prevention of cognitive decline

Elizabeth Stuart, PhD
Professor
Research interests: Statistical methods for prevention research, including missing data, causal inference, non-experimental studies, and randomized experiments. Application areas include school-based prevention programs, drug and alcohol abuse, and autism.

 

Affiliated Faculty from Other Departments and Schools

Amie Bettencourt, PhD
School of Medicine
Research interests: Broadly focus on advancing knowledge of the risk and protective factors for and interventions designed to address children’s disruptive behavior problem. Bettencourt is a faculty member at Johns Hopkins in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. She is also a clinical child psychologist in the Psychiatric Mental Health Program at the Kennedy Krieger Institute.

Catherine Bradshaw, PhD
Adjunct Professor
Research interests: Youth violence prevention, children’s mental health, school-based prevention, implementation and type II translational research, scale-up of evidence-based programs, school climate and bullying, child and adolescent development, and disparities in health and educational outcomes.

Debra Furr-Holden PhD
Adjunct Professor
Research interests: Furr-Holden is an epidemiologist with expertise in drug and alcohol dependence epidemiology, prevention science and environmental strategies and structural intervention for violence, alcohol, tobacco and other drugs.

Deborah Gross, DNSc, MS, RN
School of Nursing
Research interests: Promoting positive parent-child relationships and preventing behavior problems in preschool children from low-income neighborhoods. Gross holds the Leonard and Helen Stulman Endowed Professor in Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing at the School of Nursing, and holds joint appointments in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in the School of Medicine, and the Department of Mental Health in the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Sara Johnson, PhD
School of Medicine
Research interests: Johnson’s research focuses on understanding the biological and social mechanisms that perpetuate health inequalities across the life course and across generations and ways to interrupt them. Johnson is an associate professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine with joint appointments in the Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health and the Department of Mental Health in the Bloomberg School of Public Health. She serves as Co-Director of the Rales Center for the Integration of Health and Education, the Johns Hopkins Consortium for School-Based Health Solutions and Director of the General Academic Pediatrics Fellowship Program.