IDAPT Developing Cancer Center Team

Kristie Foley, PhD Kristie Foley, PhD, MS
MPI, Administrative Core Leader
Wake Forest University School of Medicine
kfoley@wakehealth.edu

Kristie L. Foley, PhD MS is Professor and Chair, Department of Implementation Science; Associate Dean, Wake Forest University School of Medicine / Atrium Health Research; and Associate Director of Population Sciences, Comprehensive Cancer Center. She is a cancer researcher who has had continuous extramural funding for more than 15 years with more than 100 peer- reviewed publications. Dr. Foley studies how to implement and sustain best and promising practices in primary and oncology care to reduce cancer disparities. Her research has been highlighted in the Tobacco Atlas and the Fogarty International Center’s Global Health Matters as a model for translating science into practice and policy to address the global burden of tobacco-induced diseases. Her work was also featured in the Legacy and Partnership for Prevention guide “Help Your Patients Quit Tobacco Use: An Implementation Guide for Community Health Centers” as ‘best practice’ for implementing smoking cessation support in safety net settings in the United States. As Chair of the Dept. of Implementation Science, she is committed to identifying solutions that improve cancer health equity that can be adopted and sustained in “real world” settings. She has built a network of scientists and practitioners who work with community stakeholders to implement, evaluate, and sustain evidence-based cancer prevention and control strategies.
Thomas Karr Houston II, MD Thomas K. Houston II, MD, MPH
MPI, Research Program Leader
Wake Forest University School of Medicine
tkhousto@wakehealth.edu

Thomas K. Houston II, MD MPH is a practicing Internal Medicine physician and board-certified Clinical Informatician. After graduating from the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Dr. Houston worked at multiple prestigious research-intensive institutions include the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, University of Alabama at Birmingham, and University of Massachusetts Medical School. He is also the former Director of the Veterans Health Administration's Quality Enhancement Research Initiative (QUERI) for eHealth - a national clinical operations-aligned Implementation Science initiative. Over the past 20 years, Dr. Houston has directed a portfolio of research with continuous federal funding. He studies change - change at the level of healthcare systems, individual healthcare providers, and patient behavior change. His research most often involves change supported by technology. One focus of his work has been in the area of technologies and vulnerable populations, addressing disparities in technology access, and family system interventions to support access to technology for health. Because of this work in patient-centered informatics, he was elected as Fellow in the American College of Medical Informatics. He is also a fellow in the Society of Behavioral Medicine. In the area of education, Dr. Houston has served as multi-principle investigator of two training programs - the NCI-funded PRACCTIS (Prevention and Control of Cancer: Post-Doctoral Training in Implementation Science) program and a NHLBI-funded institutional K12 program. In September, 2019, Dr. Houston rejoined Wake Forest University School of Medicine as the Vice Chair for Learning Health Systems in the Department of Internal Medicine after serving ten years as the inaugural Chief of the Division of Health Informatics and Implementation Science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He holds the rank of Professor in the Section of General Internal Medicine and in the Department of Implementation Science. Along with Drs. Foley and Cutrona, Dr. Houston serves as multi-PI of the iDAPT Center.
Sarah L Cutrona MD MPH 392x510

Sarah L. Cutrona, MD, MPH
MPI, Co-lead, Implementation Lab, UMMS
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School
sarah.cutrona@umassmed.edu


Sarah L Cutrona, MD MPH is Professor in the Departments of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences and Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. She is also a physician researcher at the Bedford Veterans Administration (VA) Center for Healthcare Organization and Implementation Research (CHOIR). Dr. Cutrona is board certified in Internal Medicine and Clinical Informatics, with additional training in Clinical Effectiveness and Implementation science and previously served (2019-2021) as Interim Chief of the Division of Health Informatics & Implementation Science at UMass. She has led studies and published on a range of topics related to cancer control communication and decision-making, focused primarily on cancer screening, prevention and information seeking. Dr. Cutrona has been lead investigator on work funded by NIH, AHRQ, industry, and the VA’s Health Services Research and Development (HSRD) and QUERI programs, studying the intersection of clinical workflow and innovative technologies. She currently leads an HSRD-funded IIR studying strategies for promoting hypertension self-management among African-American Veterans, using a combination of peer storytelling and automated text messages. Dr. Cutrona also serves as multi-PI on two QUERI-funded Partnered Evaluations studying implementation and spread of innovative practices by frontline employees within the VHA Innovation Ecosystem. Working with colleagues at Wake Forest and UMass, Dr. Cutrona also leads an NCI-funded Implementation Science Center for Cancer Control (ISC3) (NCI P50CA244693). This collaborative research center focuses on use of technologies to support rapid cycle and real time deployment and testing of implementation processes and adaptations within cancer control. Dr. Cutrona is Co-Leader of the Cancer Population Health Sciences Program at UMass. She is a practicing internist, caring for Veterans in both inpatient and outpatient settings at the Bedford VA Healthcare System.

Doug Easterling, PhD

Doug Easterling, PhD
Administrative Core Evaluation Unit Lead
Wake Forest University School of Medicine
dveaster@wakehealth.edu

Doug Easterling, PhD, has been a faculty member in the Department of Social Sciences and Health Policy at Wake Forest University School of Medicine since 2003, and served as department chair from 2005-2015. I also serve as Director of Evaluation for Wake Forest’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). His research focuses on designing, implementing and evaluating interventions to improve health and well-being, especially interventions involving collaborative problem-solving and community development. He focuses particularly on the strategies of philanthropic foundations. In 2016, I conducted a study for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation which mapped the various strategies that 33 health conversion foundations have used to address the social determinants of health. He has published over 70 articles that cover various aspects of philanthropy, evaluation and community change. My articles in Foundation Review and Stanford Social Innovation Review have provided the foundation field with tools, frameworks and evaluation findings that support the design and implementation of effective strategy. Over the past 20 years, he has served as an evaluator, strategic advisor, learning coach and facilitator for more than 30 national, state, and local foundations, including the Clinton Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Colorado Health Foundation, Kate. B. Reynolds Charitable Trust, and Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation. I have worked extensively with community foundations seeking to build social capital and to develop new community leaders. Between 2006-2011 I facilitated the National Social Capital Learning Circle.

Emily Van Meter Dressler, PhD Emily Dressler, PhD
Research Program/Methods Unit, Biostatistics
Wake Forest University School of Medicine
Emily.Dressler@wakehealth.edu

Emily Dressler, PhD, is an associate professor at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in the Department of Biostatistics and Data Science as of July 2017, and is the lead biostatistician with the WF NCI Community Oncology Research Program (NCORP) Research Base. She is also a faculty member in the Biostatistics Shared Resource at the Comprehensive Cancer Center. Previously, she was an associate professor in the Department of Biostatistics and a faculty member of the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Shared Resource Facility of the Markey Cancer Center at the University of Kentucky. She earned my PhD in the Division of Biostatistics at the Medical University of South Carolina, and while there, participated in biomedical projects in the areas of cancer, neuroscience, and nutrition; during this time, she gained considerable experience working with biologists and clinical investigators. Her primary research interest is in clinical trials. She has expertise in the design of Phase I trials using model-based, adaptive designs such as the continual reassessment method and have developed methods that are variants of this design to incorporate ordinal toxicity grading and mixed toxicity/efficacy outcomes. She additionally has methods work on adaptive interim strategies for single-arm phase II trials with continuous outcomes. She has been involved in the development of over 20 single and multi-center clinical trials where she was the lead statistician in the implementation, management, interim monitoring, and analyses. She is an active member of the Society for Clinical Trials, as currently serves of the Board of Directors and am former education committee chair. Additionally, she is an active member of AACR, ASCO, and ASA and have participated in NCI and AACR/ASCO-sponsored training workshops on methods in clinical cancer (2012), methods in cancer biostatistics for clinical trials designs with targeted agents (2015), and a faculty member for the Methods in Clinical Cancer Research Workshop (5-year term).
Kathryn E. Weaver, PhD Kathryn Weaver, PhD 
Administrative Unit Implementation Lab Outreach
Wake Forest University School of Medicine
keweaver@wakehealth.edu

Kathryn Weaver, PhD, is a researcher at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. Her research focuses on cancer survivorship, health equity and health care delivery. Her methodological areas of expertise include survey research methods, mixed methods, multi- level interventions, and dissemination and implementation research. She has served as PI of five current and completed NIH grants; m-PI on an R01 to test an EHR application to facilitate discussions regarding cardiovascular health for cancer survivors (1R01CA226078). She is the multiple PI and Cancer Care Delivery Research Lead of the Wake Forest NCI Community Oncology Research Program (NCORP) Research Base (UM1 CA189824). In this capacity, she co-directs the coordinating center and serve as the PI/co-I for multiple cancer symptom science and care delivery studies operating within the NCORP network of over 900 community oncology practices. She also serves as assistant director for the Office of Cancer Health Equity within the WFBCCC. Within the Wake Forest Clinical Translational Science Institute (CTSI), she leads the Translational Workforce Development Program and serve on the KL2 Core Faculty. She also participated in the six-month Wake Forest CTSI Mentor Academy training program for experienced research mentors.
Rajani Sadasivam PhD UMASS - iDAPT
Rajani Sadasivam, PhD
Methods Unit, Informatics
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School
rajani.sadasivam@umassmed.edu

Rajani Sadasivam, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Division of Health Informatics, Population and Quantitative Health Sciences, University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. His PhD training was in computer engineering, in the area of software and systems engineering. In collaboration with health care researchers, he has lead the development of multiple provider- and patient-facing eHealth and mHealth technologies. At UMass Chan, his research goal has been to create new knowledge involving a new generation of persuasive technology designed to help patients and clinicians better work together toward improving health and well-being. This research goal has led to two lines of federally-funded research: 1. Innovations in computer-tailored health communication (CTHC) systems. 2. Innovations in peer recruitment on social media. He is currently leading two NCI funded R01s (R01 CA190866-05 and 1R01TW010647-03), a Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute funded award (CDR-1603-34645), and 1 National Science Foundation proposal (1722708) as collaborative PI (similar to multi-PI). He has completed a five-year NCI-funded K07 award to train in Cancer prevention and control with a focus on smoking cessation (K07 CA172677-05), as well as an NCI funded R21 (1 R21 CA158968).
Rebecca Stone - Implememntation Science Rebecca Stone, BA
Project Manager of the iDAPT Center
Wake Forest University School of Medicine
rjstone@wakehealth.edu
Default Image Jessica Wijesundara, MPH, CHES®
Research Program Manager
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School
Jessica.Wijesundara@umassmed.edu

Blonde woman in glasses and red jacket smiles at camera Erica Hale, MS
iLab Program Manager
Wake Forest University School of Medicine
ehale@wakehealth.edu


Evelyn Gibbs
Project Manager
Supports the iDAPT Health Equity Supplement
Wake Forest University School of Medicine
slgibbs@wakehealth.edu