Core Lead, Contact PI

Dr. Hoeppner regularly teaches experimental methods, statistics and mHealth approaches to students, residents, fellows, and physicians and psychologists, especially junior faculty, through her roles as Associate Director of Research at the MGH Recovery Research Institute; Director of Biostatistics at the MGH Center for Addiction Medicine; and as a faculty mentor of MGH’s Division of Clinical Research’s flag ship course,

“Design and Conduct of Clinical Trials”. Her mentoring occurs within the formal context of NIH-funded training programs (currently serving on 1 K12, 5 K23 and 1 F31 mentoring teams), and through ad hoc consultations. She is particularly invested in supporting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) through her mentoring, as evidenced through her active mentoring through the Dana-Farber / UMass Boston CURE program, which seeks to provide research training to high school and college students underrepresented in medicine (UiM); and her leadership of the MGH Psychiatry Department’s new paid undergraduate UiM internship program.

Co-Lead, Contact PI/MPI

Dr. Cook is Director of the Health Equity Research Laboratory (HERLab) at Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA) and Contact PI/MPI of a P50 ALACRITY grant from NIH. He will bring his mentoring expertise in guiding trainees with leveraging of claims and electronic health records analyses, big data cleaning, warehousing, and analysis, including merging of datasets across laboratory, services, and neighborhood levels, and statistical analysis and evaluations of digitally-delivered behavioral interventions. Through his work leading HERL, he also has expertise in guiding learners with conceptualization and operationalization of rigorous empirical approaches for measuring disparities in access and quality to services and will assist RCMAR Scientists with these approaches in their ADRD behavioral health research. In addition to his extensive mentoring experience in his lab at CHA, Dr. Cook has an established track record of collaborative mentoring experience, having previously served together for nearly a decade with Mentor Dr. Margarita Alegria and Mass-ENVISION PI Dr. Okereke on the Harvard Medical School (HMS) Psychiatry Research Committee which oversees and monitors, through monthly meetings, the progress of dozens of trainees in 4 HMS-wide mentored fellowship programs for psychiatry residents, psychology interns, fellows and early-career faculty. He has received mentorship awards from NIDA-AACAP and HMS and awards for his work related to measuring racial/ethnic disparities from AcademyHealth and NIMH.

AnC Member

Dr. Flores is an Instructor in Psychiatry at CHA and HMS, and a Research Scientist at the CHA HERLab. He has experience using large datasets and robust analytic methods to assess racial and ethnic disparities in behavioral health services with additional experience leading quantitative, quasi-experimental analysis of big datasets, using a broad range of advanced statistical methods. Dr. Flores will provide particular expertise with data records management, big dataset cleaning, subsetting and merging of datasets, and statistical analysis and evaluations of digitally-delivered behavioral interventions.

AnC Member

Dr. Locascio has been a long-time key member of the statistics team of the MADRC, where he meets regularly with MADRC investigators and provides statistical consultation on all matters of design and analysis. He is also is one of the core statisticians of the Harvard Catalyst (CTSA) Biostatistics Consultation service and serves as Faculty of the MGH Biostatistics Center. He will bring his decades of experience as a biostatistician for a wide range of ADRD research projects, and he will provide mentoring and hands-on guidance to RCMAR Scientists in the development of their comfort and facility with analytic methods and tools in ADRD research.

AnC Member

Dr. Hoeppner brings expertise in the analysis of NIH Stage 1-3 studies in psychiatry and psychology, including expertise in working with the FDA to obtain approval for mHealth clinical trials. She routinely trains and advises research assistants, data managers, and clinical staff on principles of good clinical practice, and provides guidance to postdoctoral and K-level mentees.

AnC Member

Dr. Onnela brings expertise in social and biological networks and their connection to health as well as digital phenotyping. His mentoring experience includes his role as MPI of a long-standing T32 award in psychiatric epidemiology (T32 MH017119), a primary appointment among the teaching faculty of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, and being a mentor, along with Mass-ENVISION PI Dr. Okereke, of Mass-ENVISION co-investigator Dr. Felipe Jain’s NIA Beeson K76 award. Of note, he and his team have developed and maintain an open-source research platform called “Beiwe” that can be leveraged for high-throughput smartphone-based digital phenotyping, a resource that will be available to RCMAR Scientists.

AnC Member

Dr. Vranceanu brings additional expertise around digital health (K24AT011760; R21AG075187; R01AG075899), as well as deep expertise with qualitative and mixed methods. She has a K24 focused on behavioral health intervention development with a focus on health disparities. She has mentored more than 65 individuals and has 5 active K mentees, all in behavioral health. She has given national workshops in qualitative methods (focus groups, interviews, dyadic) and qualitative analyses (grounded theory, thematic, inductive-deductive). Dr. Vranceanu also has specialized expertise with dyadic behavioral health intervention development, including unique considerations for measurement, qualitative and quantitative approaches.

AnC Member

Dr. Quiroz brings advanced expertise in ADRD, neuropsychology, health disparities, and culturally appropriate clinical research. She has mentored numerous UiM students, fellows and junior faculty, and 15 early-career investigators at MGH in her roles as Director of the Multicultural Assessment and Research Center (MARC), Director of the Multicultural Alzheimer’s Prevention Program (MAPP), and Director of the Multicultural Track of the Psychiatry Internship in Clinical Psychology. Dr. Quiroz's research focuses on the primary prevention of ADRD among individuals at high-risk (genetic predisposition), with a particular focus on Latino individuals. She will provide RCMAR Scientists with expert mentoring and training in the CDC and NAM models of prevention as she routinely implements these frameworks in her large clinical and research program of ADRD prevention.

AnC Member

Dr. Travison brings senior expertise and extensive mentoring experience as PI of the Biostatistics and Data Science Core of the Boston Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center (OAIC), Senior Scientist & Director of Biostatistics and Data Sciences at the Hebrew SeniorLife (HSL) Marcus Institute for Aging Research, Co-Director of the Interventional Studies in Aging center at the Marcus Institute, and Associate Leader of the Design and Statistics Core for the NIA IMPACT Collaboratory, and he serves on the NIA’s Clinical Trial Advisory Panel. He will provide guidance on optimal approaches to mentoring of RCMAR Scientists in innovative methods and statistical work. For example, he will provide expertise and consulting as needed with RCMAR Scientists on conducting simulation studies and power calculation – activities that are critical to the success of future plans to translate pilot projects into larger ADRD behavioral interventions trials.

REC Mentors

Dr. Donelan brings expertise in survey methodology, particularly as it is leveraged to capture the experience of patients and caregivers. Her mentoring experience includes working with colleagues at Brandeis University and the MGH Mongan Institute to train fellows and junior faculty in conduct of national and international survey work. She exemplifies team science approaches in her work and will model and train RCMAR Scientists in this approach to increase methodologic rigor of their work. She will provide expertise as a statistician and methodologist in health policy and healthy equity research to support the education, training and project success of the RCMAR Scientists.

REC Mentors

Dr. Ghebremichael brings expertise in developing statistical methods to uniquely adapt them for answering research questions of particularly relevance in chronic disease research. In his work at the MGH Biostatistics Center and as Director of Biostatistics and Database Cores at the Ragon Institute of MGH, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University, he routinely uses multiple statistical software platforms (e.g., SAS, R, MATLAB), and thus is able to connect with his mentees in the programming space they are most comfortable in. His mentoring experience includes assisting students, fellows, junior faculty and other learners with the application and development of statistical methods for chronic disease research. He has extensive experience in providing training in software use, statistical analysis and other quantitative tools, and his specific focus is providing hands-on support with knowledge development, including course instruction or one-on-one meetings.