Collaborators
David E. Arterburn, MD, MPH
Senior Investigator
Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute
David Arterburn, MD, MPH, is a general internist and health services researcher who focuses on finding safe, effective, and innovative ways to treat obesity. As a national leader in obesity research, his goal is to help individuals and families make treatment decisions that align with their values while sustaining their health over the long haul. Dr. Arterburn's research portfolio includes policy-level interventions for health plans, behavioral and lifestyle interventions for weight loss, pharmacoepidemiology, the long-term outcomes of bariatric surgery, and shared decision making related to elective surgery. In 2016 he launched a two-year, $4.5 million study comparing the health benefits and safety associated with the three main types of bariatric surgery: Roux-en-Y gastric bypass, sleeve gastrectomy, and adjustable gastric banding. Funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, the study aims to give patients and their health care providers the information they need to decide which type of surgery is best for them. He is also co-leading Kaiser Permanente Washington’s evaluation of a new technology-based lifestyle program to support people after bariatric surgery.
Jeffrey R. Curtis, MD, MS, MPH
Harbert Ball Endowed Chair Professor
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Jeffrey Curtis is a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Dr. Curtis received a Medical Degree (MD) and a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree from Oregon Health & Sciences University in Portland, OR. He subsequently completed a residency in internal medicine at Oregon Health & Science University and a fellowship in rheumatology at UAB. He completed a graduate program in Clinical Informatics at Stanford University and received his Master of Science (MS) degree in epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is board certified in both rheumatology and clinical informatics. Dr. Curtis currently holds the William J. Koopman Endowed Professorship in Rheumatology and Immunology at UAB. He is the Co-Director of the UAB Center for Education and Research on Therapeutics (CERTs) of Musculoskeletal Disorders, which has a major emphasis on evaluating the safety and comparative effectiveness of medications for rheumatic diseases. Additionally, as the Director of the UAB Arthritis Clinical Intervention Program, he leads the clinical trials unit for the rheumatology division at UAB, with a particular focus on rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and psoriatic arthritis (PsA). He is the Co-Director of the UAB Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics Research (PEER) Unit. PEER uses multiple large data sources to study comparative effectiveness questions across multiple chronic diseases. These data sources include national administrative data from Medicare and commercial health plans, electronic health record data, and large registries. In 2012, he was awarded the Henry Kunkel Young Investigator Award by the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) and was accepted into the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) in 2016.
Bruce H. Fireman, MA
Biostatistician III
Kaiser Permanente Northern California
Bruce Fireman is a biostatistician and research scientist at the Division of Research, Kaiser Permanente Northern California. His research interests include assessment of the effectiveness and safety of vaccines and drugs, and the costs and outcomes of healthcare delivery systems. He works with population-based data, comparing the effectiveness of alternative treatments and alternative ways of delivering healthcare. He has evaluated disease management programs, Web-based care and primary care teams. He has collaborated with Kaiser Permanente clinicians and administrators in efforts to improve health services.
Kathleen M. Mazor, EdD
Professor
University of Massachusetts Medical School
Kathleen Mazor, EdD is a Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and Associate Director of the Meyers Primary Care Institute. Trained in psychometrics, her current research interests include physician-patient communication, health literacy, disclosure of medical errors, and decision-making. She has led and collaborated on numerous studies investigating the impact of various strategies for communicating health-related information to patients and the public. A consistent theme in her research is to understanding the patient’s perspective on health and healthcare. Dr. Mazor has extensive experience in developing and validating instruments to measure knowledge, attitudes and beliefs in patients and providers. Dr. Mazor received her Doctorate in Education from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
W. Benjamin Nowell, PhD
Director of Patient-Centered Research
Global Health Living Foundation
W. Benjamin Nowell is Director, Patient-Centered Research, at the Global Healthy Living Foundation (GHLF), CreakyJoints® and co-Principal Investigator of ArthritisPower™ Patient-Powered Research Network with Jeffrey Curtis, MD, MS, MPH (University of Alabama at Birmingham) and Seth Ginsberg. Ben leads all research activities conducted by the organization, including facilitating studies conducted with academic and industry partners. Recent projects include rheumatoid arthritis (RA) shared decision making projects with Dr. Liana Fraenkel, MD, MPH at Yale and a survey of the family planning concerns of patients with inflammatory arthritis with Dr. Megan Clowse, MD, MPH at Duke. Ben also leads a hip/knee joint replacement patient research engagement project called BeTTER SAID with co-PI Thomas Concannon, PhD at RAND. His research interests include examination of the factors that facilitate patient engagement as research partners, and patient-reported outcomes and shared decision making in rheumatologic conditions. Prior to joining GHLF, Ben worked as a medical social worker and Community and Long-Term Care Coordinator for the Ottawa Regional Stroke Centre and as Research Coordinator for an evaluation of participant outcomes in Arthritis Foundation chronic disease self-management programs for arthritis. He holds a Master of Social Welfare Management from UC Berkeley and PhD in Social Work from Columbia University.
Marsha A. Raebel, PharmD
Senior Investigator
Kaiser Permanente Colorado
Marsha A. Raebel, PharmD, is Senior Investigator at the Institute for Health Research. Her research focuses on patient safety, medication adherence, and pharmacoepidemiology, with an emphasis on adverse drug event surveillance and reducing medication and laboratory monitoring errors in the outpatient setting. Dr. Raebel completed her doctoral training in pharmacotherapy at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio and the University of Texas at Austin College of Pharmacy. She is nationally-recognized for her foundational research in medication adherence and safety, diabetes, clinical pharmacy, and clinical decision support. She is the coordinating investigator across Kaiser Permanente for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Sentinel initiative and an investigator in the FDA-sponsored Medication Exposure in Pregnancy Risk Evaluation Program (MEPREP) project. Dr. Raebel is a Clinical Professor at the University of Colorado Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciencesand a Fellow of the American College of Clinical Pharmacy.
Aleksandra Slavkovic, PhD
Professor
Penn State University
Aleksandra Slavkovic is a professor of Statistics at the Department of Statistics at Penn State University, University Park, and an associate dean for graduate education in the Eberly College of Science at Penn State. Aleksandra has affiliated appointments in the Institute for CyberScience, the Department of Public Health Sciences, and the Penn State College of Medicine, and she serves on Penn State’s Clinical and Translational Sciences Director’s Council. She received master's degrees in human-computer interaction and in statistics and a doctoral degree in statistics from Carnegie Mellon University. Her primary research interest is in the area of data privacy and confidentiality, focusing on statistical disclosure limitation, statistical utility and their interplay with differential privacy, with applications across different domains. Other related past and current research interests include evaluation methods for human performance in virtual environments, statistical data mining, algebraic statistics, causal inference, and more broadly the application of statistics to information sciences and social sciences.
Erick Moyneur, MA
Managing Partner
Statlog
Erick Moyneur is an econometrician and managing partner at Statlog. Erick has been involved in signal detection analyses (hypothesis-generating and hypothesis-testing frameworks) using public, private and commercially available data sources and in distributed research networks (DRNs). He has used economic modeling, forecast models and discrete choice analyses to help resolve economic disputes. He has created, benchmarked, implemented and provided training on optimization algorithms. These have included user-friendly applications for high-tech and pharmaceutical firms and electric utility companies as strategy decision support tools for supply chain management issues. Erick holds a BSc in Mathematics and a M.A. in Economics with a specialization in econometrics and quantitative modeling.