Our Faculty and Staff

Jennifer Carroll, MD, MPH is Professor and Vice Chair for Research at UMass Chan’s Department of Family Medicine and Community Health. Prior to joining UMass, she served as Research Professor and Associate Vice Chair for Research at the University of Colorado Department of Family Medicine and Research Director of UCHealth’s Integrative Medicine Center. From 2015-2021, she served as Director of the American Academy of Family Physicians National Research Network. A major theme of Dr. Carroll’s scholarship is her experience with implementation of several practice-based research projects, many of which have addressed health disparities in chronic conditions (e.g., asthma, cancer, hypertension, diabetes, HIV), pragmatic clinical trials, integrative medicine approaches, healthy lifestyle interventions for historically disadvantaged populations. Dr. Carroll serves on the Executive Committee of BraveNet, an international practice-based research network of integrative medicine centers. Dr. Carroll has received continuous funding for more than 25 years as principal investigator and/or co-investigator on several NIH, PCORI, and other federally funded grants examining patient-centered communication, health promotion and disease prevention interventions, health disparities, and practice-based research in primary care.  In recent years, Dr. Carroll has developed a growing emphasis on the understanding and application of health equity to research in family medicine. Her recent contributions have increasingly emphasized strategies to incorporate health equity principles and frameworks into design, implementation, and assessment of research and health care reform in the US.

Jennifer Carroll (0000-0002-1809-600X) - ORCID

Philip Day, PhD is a trained philosopher and medical ethicist with extensive experience in research ethics, community-based participatory research, and educational evaluation. Most of his research output is dedicated to ethical issues in primary care practice, social determinants of health, and medical education. He has a decade of IRB service and currently co-chairs the Environmental Protection Agency’s Human Subjects Review Board.

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2713-0529

Paula Gardiner, MD, MPH, is an Associate Professor of Family Medicine and Community Health at University Massachusetts Chan Medical School. She directs the group medical visit program in the Center for Integrated Primary Care.  She is the director of Primary Care Implementation Research at Center for Mindfulness and Compassion at Cambridge Health Alliance. In addition to completing her MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health, she also completed a three-year Clinical Research Fellowship in Complementary and Alternative Medicine Research and Faculty Development at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Gardiner, with funding from NIH and a PCORI grant, focuses her research on medical group visits, mindfulness, technology, and health disparities and increasing access in low-income patients. Current research is focused on the adaptive role of a Medical Group Visits combining mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and a medical group visit to support health behavior change and reducing pain and stress. Dr. Gardiner is leading the implementation of this medical group visit model nationally and provides training on medical group visits around the United States. She has published over 105 peer-reviewed papers on chronic pain, health disparities, technology, dietary supplements, stress, and integrative medicine in underserved patients. She also has an interest in clinician stress and self-compassion. As a researcher in mindfulness, she became a certified meditation teacher, a Mindful Self-Compassion teacher. 

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3663-000X) - ORCID

Lee Hargraves, PhD, Associate Professor of Family Medicine and Community Health, focuses his research on using patient and consumer assessments of health care to improve quality of medical care. He has extensive experience developing and evaluating survey questions, specifically to create patient experience surveys to assess health care quality. Dr Hargraves’ research has contributed to national efforts to document racial and ethnic disparities in health care. His current interests focus on eliminating disparities and promoting equity in health care. With colleagues in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, Dr. Hargraves has developed and tested curricula to teach community health workers to support patients living with chronic conditions. Collaborating with the UMass Center for Health Equity Intervention Research, he was co-principal investigator on a study funded by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities to train and deploy community health workers to use motivational interviewing to support patients with hypertension in their efforts to control blood pressure. Dr. Hargraves is a Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Center for Survey Research at UMass Boston, where he works as a survey scientist on the Consumer Assessments of Healthcare Provider & Systems (CAHPS) project.

Jay Himmelstein, MD, MPH, Professor of Family Medicine and Community Health and Population and Quantitative Health Sciences. He also serves as a Senior Health Policy Advisor for ForHealth Consulting. His professional career in research, policy development, and service is dedicated to improving health care and health outcomes for those served by the public sector with a special emphasis on people with disabilities, leading him to be a nationally recognized physician, educator, and researcher. His most recent work has focused on an independent evaluation of the Massachusetts Medicaid Waiver with emphasis on delivery system improvements and addressing the social determinants of health.

Roger Luckmann, MD, MPH, Professor Emeritus of Family Medicine and Community Health, is a primary care internist with advanced training and experience in health services research and in medical informatics. He has been involved in research on promoting cancer screening for more than 20 years. With support from NIH, CDC, and the Komen Foundation, he and his colleagues have focused on the development and evaluation of innovative, computer-assisted telephone counseling programs for promoting breast and colon cancer screening and for supporting informed decision-making on prostate cancer screening. Dr. Luckmann also has an active interest in chronic pain management in primary care and has developed a handheld electronic pain diary that he proposes to evaluate in future research efforts. Supported by a contract from the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute he recently collaborated with professional mediators in convening multistakeholder panels that developed clinical practice guidelines on prostate and lung cancer screening for Massachusetts. He continues to collaborate with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and the Massachusetts Cancer Prevention and Control Network on supporting evidence-based lung and prostate cancer screening throughout the state.  

Alison Karasz, PhD, is a clinical and health psychologist and Professor at UMass Chan School of Medicine. She received her AB from Harvard College, her PhD at the City University of New York and her post-doctoral training at the Center for Health Care Policy and Research at Rutgers University. Dr. Karasz is an expert in the areas of culture, health, and mental health. She has conducted numerous NIH-funded studies with South Asian immigrants in New York and in South Asia. Currently, her research focuses on the development of structural interventions to address social determinants of health.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/1dohm3wDAHwQk/bibliography/public/

Diane McKee, MD, MS, UMass Memorial Ledwith Chair in Family Medicine and Community Health at UMass Chan. Prior to coming to UMass Chan in June 2019, she served as Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Family and Social Medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. There, she directed the New York City Research Improvement Networking Group (NYC RING) practice-based research network, an urban PBRN dedicated to primary care research and program development that improves outcomes and decreases health disparities. She also served as Director of the BraveNet Coordinating Center until July of 2022 and continues as a member of its Executive Committee; BraveNet is a national PBRN dedicated to conducting research related to integrative medicine. She currently directs the UMass Ambulatory Research Consortium (UMass-ARC) PBRN. As a clinical outcomes and health services researcher, she conducted projects using mixed methods to explore health issues with funding from the American Cancer Society, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, NIH, HRSA and PCORI. She advised numerous investigators on appropriate methods to conduct health research that interfaces with the clinical delivery system including studies related to coordination of care for complex patients. She was co-director of the Health Systems and Population Health core of the NYC Diabetes Translational Research Center and Director of the Health Research Implementation Core of Einstein’s ICTR; in both roles she provided consultation and mentorship to junior investigators. Through June 2019, she was contact PI for the AHRQ-funded EXPLORE Center, a new K12 program at Einstein/Montefiore focused on training investigators to conduct Learning Health System research. She has conducted numerous studies of integrative treatments in real world settings. These include serving as PI of two studies employing acupuncture for chronic musculoskeletal in urban primary care (ADDOPT 1 and ADDOPT 2), co-investigator and Coordinating Center director for the PRIMIER registry study conducted in BraveNet practices, Co-PI (with Jeff Dusek) of the Acupuncture in the Emergency Department for Pain Management: A BraveNet Multi-Center Feasibility Study (ACUITY). For the proposed ACUITY 2 study, she will serve as MPI with Dr. Dusek and lead the UMass Worcester trial site team.

M. Diane McKee (0000-0002-1228-718X) - ORCID

Suzanne Mitchell, MD, Associate Professor and Director of Research in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, is an accomplished health services researcher and board-certified physician in family medicine and hospice and palliative care. Her work focuses on patient-centered approaches to improve quality of care for populations at risk for poor health outcomes.  She was co-investigator for Project Re-Engineered Discharge (RED), a now nationally disseminated program designed to reduce hospital readmissions during care transitions. Her efforts have contributed to the adaptation and adoption of the Project RED toolkit in diverse settings. Dr. Mitchell additionally has expertise in the study of digital health innovations for chronic disease management among underserved populations. Her cutting-edge study, Women in Control 2.0, was among the first clinical trials to deliver immersive, technology-enabled medical group visits for diabetes. Most recently, she was awarded a 5-year R01 grant from the National Institute on Nursing Research to study a novel approach to screening hospitalized patients for unmet social needs.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5618-7383

Daniel Mullin, PsyD, MPH is 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. Dr. Mullin is a clinician, educator, researcher, and consultant specializing in the integration of behavioral health and primary care services. He maintains a clinical practice embedded in the Barre Family Health Center, a rural family medicine residency practice in Massachusetts. Dr. Mullin is a member of the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers and provides training in Motivational Interviewing to healthcare providers. He is a developer of the Practice Integration Profile, a measure of the integration of behavioral and primary care services.

Dr. Mullin completed his doctorate in Clinical Psychology at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky and received his Masters in Public Health from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He completed his internship in Primary Care Psychology in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, and his fellowship in Primary Care Family Psychology in the Departments of Medicine, Psychiatry, and Family Medicine at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry.

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7121-9403

Ekaterina (Kate) Pivovarova, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School and a licensed clinical psychologist. Dr. Pivovarova’s research uses implementation science techniques to improve access to care for individuals with criminal legal involvement and those struggling with substance use and mental health disorders. Dr. Pivovarova’s work aims to improve collaboration and, in turn, treatment engagement and retention for at-risk  

individuals between healthcare and legal systems by using empirically based techniques. Dr. Pivovarova is the recipient of a National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) K23 Career Development Award and serves as the co-Investigator of a NIDA- UG1 center to examine the state-wide implementation of Medications for Opioid Use Disorders in Massachusetts jails. Dr. Pivovarova is a co-Investigator in the Research Education Core in a NIDA UC2 that provides research training for junior investigators, clinicians, and criminal legal scholars in correctional health settings. Dr. Pivovarova is also a co-Investigator and the Director of the Evaluation Unit and the co-Director of the Implementation Science Unit for the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) P50 Center for Accelerating Practices to End Suicide Technology Translation (CAPES). Dr. Pivovarova is also the Academic Director of the Justice, Health and Equity Division of the ForHealth Consulting at UMass Chan Medical School. She is involved in a wide array of community and academic services, including as the Academic Director for the Academic Consortium for Criminal Justice Health (ACCJH), a national organization to advance healthcare research for those involved with the criminal legal system.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2074-8775

Hugh Silk, MD, MPH, FAAFP, is a Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and Vice Chair for Community Health. He also teaches at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine (HSDM). Hugh has excelled in dental-medical integration and oral health promotion.  He is co-founder of the award-winning national curriculum on oral health for health providers entitled "Smiles for Life". He is the past recipient of the American Association of Public Health Dentistry’s Public Service Award.  Currently he is co-PI for the Center for Integration of Primary Care and Oral Health (CIPCOH) and the 100 Million Mouths Campaign supporting oral health champions in 26 states with a goal over the next five years of having champions in all 50 states to integrate oral health into medical, nursing, and primary care schools and programs across the US.  He has been an invited speaker at over fifty education symposiums, presented at over one hundred national and international conferences, published seventy-five journal articles, eighty chapters, and a dozen policy briefs.  His clinical care is providing outreach care for individuals experiencing homelessness and substance use issues. 

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7360-5682

Sonal Singh, MD, is an Associate Professor of Family Medicine and Community Health, with a joint appointment in the Division of Health System Sciences at the UMass Chan Medical School. He previously served as the Associated Director for the Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Singh is also a practicing general internist and confronted with the challenge of diagnosing and treating patients with Alzheimer’s dementia in daily practice. He has more than a decade of experience as a health services researcher during which time he has developed strong methodologic skills in study design, comparative effectiveness research, shared decision making, and epidemiology.  Dr. Singh has a long history of multi-site collaborative research, including planning and implementing validation studies and pragmatic trials.  Along with Drs Gurwitz and Dr Li, he is currently a co-investigator on a large NIA-sponsored pragmatic trial of interventions to promote deprescribing of strong anticholinergics, antipsychotics and sedative hypnotics among patients with Alzheimer’s disease. He also collaborated with Dr Gurwitz and Dr Li to develop a master protocol to conduct state of the art safety and effectiveness studies using real world data with anti-amyloid therapies.  He is a member of the Data Safety Monitoring Committee of the large adaptive, multi-arm platform trial for COVID-19 (TOGETHER Trial) which is evaluating multiple therapeutic options for COVID-19 and received the clinical trial of the year award from the Society for Clinical Trials in 2022.  He has experience with real world data and developed the Algorithm Certainty Tool (ACE-IT) tool to evaluate the quality of algorithms on safety outcomes to support regulatory decisions. This tool has the potential to inform the development of high-quality algorithms for safety outcomes such as ARIA. Dr. Singh's research efforts have been supported by the NIH, FDA, AHRQ, PCORI, and other various private foundations, and have been published in JAMA, BMJ, Annals of Internal Medicine and Lancet.

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0912-941X

Diana Rinker is a Program Manager for the Ambulatory Research Consortium (Arc), a practice-based research network of UMass Chan Medical School. Diana has a clinical background as a mental health counselor, as well as experience in learning cohorts coordination, research project management, and data analytics. Since 2018, she has worked on various research projects at UMass Chan in the departments of Psychiatry and Pediatrics and is currently in Family Medicine. Diana coordinates ARC infrastructure and operations, including ARC annual Pilot Awards and clinic communication. In addition to ARC and department research infrastructure work, Diana supports the Ben Gerber and Diane McKee (PQHS) for RCT studies: TEAM CGM and SMBP, Hugh Silk on two Oral Health Projects: 100 MMC and RIZE, and Dan Mullin around Behavioral Health Integration and PIP2.0 assessment. Diana provides project coordination, data collection, and management expertise in REDCap, Qualtrics, SharePoint, R and Power BI reporting.

Sandra Girouard is an Administrative Assistant and Project Coordinator, currently supporting the FMCH research division, Center for Integrated Primary Care, RIZE Grant,

100 MMC and the Hepatitis C/General Hepatology ECHO Team as well as assisting with departmental responsibilities. She earned an associate degree in Criminal Law and Social Services from Mount Wachusett and has 25+ years of experience in the education field. Outside of work, Sandra enjoys archery and hiking. 

Barbara De La Cruz is a Research Program Manager in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health. She has coordinated and advanced research project objectives in a variety of patient and faculty-facing roles since 2015. Currently, Barbara oversees Dr. Suzanne Mitchell’s academic and administrative portfolio at UMass Chan, including the launch of her recently NIH-funded Re-Engineered Discharge for Diabetes Care Transitions project for hospitalized patients with unmet social needs. Barbara’s experience in qualitative methods and with Institutional Review Board submissions additionally allows her to provide ad-hoc support on other faculty-led projects. Alongside Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jen Carroll, she additionally co-hosts monthly research-in-progress and research forum meetings for the department.

Alexandra Boland is a Research Coordinator III in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health. She is part of the NIMH-funded Center for Accelerating Practices to End Suicide (CAPES) and the ForHealth Consulting Community Pathways. Alexandra supports the Evaluation and Implementation Units of CAPES, aiding in the comprehensive evaluation of all CAPES activities and public health impact. As part of Community Pathways, she is responsible for all outreach and coordination facilitating connection between the Massachusetts Parole Board and community treatment providers. Additionally, Alexandra holds a master’s degree in Mental Health Counseling.

Lorna Chiasson is a Project Manager I who has been in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health since 2001.  She works as a liaison between department PIs and the Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP) and Grants Accounting and Compliance (GAC).  Lorna primarily supports grant funded initiatives by performing a variety of administrative, logistical and customer services tasks. She also supports and tracks internally funded projects including the Mick Huppert Community Health Service Awards, the Remillard Awards and the Ambulatory Research Consortium (ARC) awards.   

Arundhati Debnath, MS, is a Clinical Research Coordinator II working with Dr. Alison Karasz at the Culture, Health, and Mental Health Lab at UMass Chan Medical School. She graduated with an MS in Psychology from Villanova University. Her broad research interests include the implications of parenting on children’s socio-emotional development. At the Culture, Health and Mental Health Lab, she manages the lab research projects. Ongoing projects focus on Bangladeshi women’s and children’s health, depression, and poverty in rural Bangladesh, and understanding long-term use of antidepressants.