Committee Chair
Karen Albright, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Community and Behavioral Health in the Colorado School of Public Health at the University of Colorado Denver, Anschutz Medical Campus. She is also the Qualitative Research CORE Leader in the Colorado Health Outcomes Program (COHO), a center in the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and in the Children’s Outcomes Research Program (COR), in The Children’s Hospital Research Institute. Karen earned her PhD from New York University and received postdoctoral training in health policy and mental health from, respectively, the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University. She has extensive expertise in qualitative data analysis and has worked with a variety of qualitative methods, including in-depth interviews, focus groups, and ethnography. Her research interests center on health behaviors among socioeconomically disadvantaged populations, the psychosocial and health implications of socioeconomic mobility, and the social-psychological effects of trauma.
Committee Members
Juliana Barnard, MA, is Senior Professional Research Assistant in the Children's Outcomes Research Program (COR) at the University of Colorado Denver, Anschutz Medical Campus, and The Children's Hospital Research Institute. She received her MA from the University of Oklahoma and was an epidemiologist at National Jewish Health for twelve years prior to coming to COR. Juli has completed or is currently engaged in qualitative studies in the areas of sarcoidosis etiology, quality of life, and the care of special needs pediatric populations.
Douglas Fernald, MA, is Senior Instructor with the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Colorado Denver, Anschutz Medical Campus. He has over a decade of mixed-method research and evaluation experience that ranges from large, multi-site evaluations to small, exploratory research projects. He specializes in practice-based research and qualitative research methods. Doug is the Director of BIGHORN and Assistant Director of CaReNet, both primary care, practice-based research networks in Colorado. He is a member of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's PBRN Resource Center Steering Committee, and teaches beginning- and intermediate-level courses on ATLAS.ti qualitative data software.
Bridget Gaglio, PhD, MPH, is a research scientist in the Mid-Atlantic Permanente Research Institute at Kaiser Permanente Mid-Atlantic States. She received her PhD from the University of Colorado Denver and her MPH from the University of Texas, School of Public Health. The majority of her research has been mixed methods or qualitative in nature. Bridget is currently engaged in three new qualitative projects focused on patient communication and cancer care. Her research interests include health literacy, health disparities, translation of research, and use of technology in health promotion.
Leah Haverhals, MA, is a Health Research Specialist at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Denver. She received her MA from Indiana University and previously worked at the Colorado Health Outcomes Program as a project manager for health and technology and community-based participatory research studies utilizing qualitative and quantitative research methods. She then spent a year in Mumbai, India, where she taught English, basic math, and computer skills to children who lived in the slums. Leah has over nine years of research experience, including five focused on qualitative methods such as focus group and in-depth interview approaches. At the VA, she manages nine protocols, one of which examines the methods used by medical providers to track patients who are on long-term steroids but may be susceptible to adverse drug reactions.
Carolyn T. Nowels, MSPH, is Senior Professional Research Assistant in the Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of Colorado Denver, Anschutz Medical Campus. She received her MSPH from the University of Colorado, Department of Preventive Medicine and Biometrics. Carolyn has collaborated on numerous qualitative research projects over the past two decades, including those investigating cardiovascular health, diabetes prevention, childhood and adolescent immunizations, and statewide community health promotion. More recent areas of interest include returning to work after cancer, palliative care in heart failure, advance care planning and ICD implantation decision-making processes, and alternative visit models in hospice care.
Courtney Lee, MA, is a PhD Candidate in Health and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Colorado Denver. She also currently works at the Colorado Trust in the Research, Evaluation and Strategic Learning Department. She received her MA in cultural anthropology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. For her dissertation research, she conducted ethnographic fieldwork on medical tourism, a phenomenon in which patients from developed countries travel to less developed countries for health care procedures. Her fieldwork examines the impact that this global process has on the national health care system in Costa Rica. Courtney has also used qualitative methods in several additional research studies to investigate a wide range of topics in the areas of anthropology, public health, medicine, and education.
Jean Scandlyn, PhD, is Research Assistant Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Health and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Colorado, downtown Denver campus. A medical anthropologist, her research interests focus on adolescence and early adulthood, migration and health care in American society, and global health with a focus on South America. Jean has completed a variety of community-based studies using qualitative methods and, with colleague Sarah Hautzinger and students at Colorado College, is currently working on an ethnographic study of the effects of multiple deployments on soldiers, their families, and the community of Colorado Springs. As a Fulbright scholar, she also leads collaborative workshops on qualitative research methods with staff of health-related non-governmental organizations in Bolivia.
Danielle M. Varda, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado Denver with a secondary appointment in the Colorado School of Public Health, Department of Health Systems, Management, and Policy. She specializes in collaborative management and policy networks, focusing specifically on public health systems research. Her research focus is on evaluating the network structure of collaborations between the public, private, and nonprofit sectors and the subsequent network affects of these recorded interactions. Using mixed methods in her research, she has developed models and methods of network measurement. Her work includes the development of a research model for measuring social capital by evaluating the network structure of local community networks, including developing questionnaires, conducting interviews and focus groups, and analysis of diverse network data. With funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, she is the author and manager of a social network analysis software tool (PARTNER, www.partnertool.ne) that allows community collaboratives to measure and monitor their partnership activity over time. Dr. Varda’s PARTNER tool was featured in her first place award for the 2008 Maxwell School Collaborative Governance Initiative competition, Teaching Simulation.