External Advisory Committee
The Action Network consists of a leadership team from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and an external advisory committee composed of Public Health Deans/Program Heads, two community representatives (one of whom was formerly incarcerated), and one student representative. Cumulatively, these individuals will form a core group of public health school leaders who will provide a national vision and voice to the effort to work collectively to introduce incarceration in public health curricula and research, to raise awareness and concern, and to inspire and support their fellow scholars.
Sonia Alemagno, PhD
Dean, College of Public Health, Professor of Health Policy and Management, Kent State University
Dr. Alemagno joined Kent State University after having spent the past 10 years at the University of Akron. Her most recent roles at the University of Akron were as director of the Institute for Health and Social Policy and chair of the Department of Public Administration and Urban Studies. Dr. Alemagno received the University of Akron Outstanding Researcher Award in 2005. Dr. Alemagno has focused her research on substance abuse and HIV/STD prevention, particularly examining public health services delivered within criminal justice settings such as prisons and detention centers. As principle investigator, she has been awarded more than $5 million in funded research from agencies that include the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute on Justice, the Centers for Disease Control and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Kathleen Culhane, MPP
Leading with Conviction Fellow, Justleadershipusa
Kathleen Culhane recently received her Master’s degree in Public Policy from the Heller School for Social Policy at Brandeis University where she was awarded the Graduate Impact Award for having a lasting impact on her cohort and the Public Policy Program. A former prisoner, she currently is a consultant and researcher on the effects of incarceration on the health of individuals and communities. Her previous roles include research assistance on Harvard University’s Boston Reentry Study and a graduate research internship at the Vera Institute for Justice’s Center on Sentencing and Corrections. A student leader at Brandeis, she founded a criminal justice policy working group at the policy school. She additionally coordinates a peer support group for formerly incarcerated women. Prior to graduate school, Kathleen worked as a health educator at the Women’s Community Clinic of San Francisco and was a VISTA volunteer at the San Francisco Department of Public Health. She developed community organizing on solitary confinement issues and served as a formerly incarcerated representative to the San Francisco Reentry Council’s Subcommittee on Health and Well-being of Formerly Incarcerated individuals. She is currently a member of JustLeadershipUSA's 2015 Leading with Conviction cohort.
Chair, School of Social Work, Professor of Social Work, Temple University
Dr. Draine is Professor and Chair of the School of Social Work at Temple University. His primary research interests are rehabilitation, empowerment and recovery oriented services for people involved with the justice system who also live with behavioral health concerns. These include psychiatric disabilities, HIV, and addiction. He is also affiliated with the Temple University Collaborative on Community Inclusion. He began his career as an activist for homelessness and housing related causes in Richmond, Virginia. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare.
Professor of Health Services Evaluation, Department of Health Services Administration, University of Puerto Rico
Dr. Albizu-García is a physician and a Professor at the Health Services Evaluation program within the Department of Health Services Administration at the Puerto Rico Graduate School of Public Health and a researcher at the Center for Evaluation and Sociomedical Research. She has co-authored research manuscripts in mental health services research, addressing factors associated with services utilization among the medically indigent. Dr. Albizu-García recently examined the extent of turnover in mental health and substance abuse (MHSA) provider networks within public sector managed behavioral care over a one-year period and its association to provider and practice characteristics. Her current preliminary studies explore mental health services provider’s perceptions of their organizational climate as well as its correlates.
Ralph Rivera Guiterrez, PhD
Dean, Graduate School of Public Health, University of Puerto Rico
Dr. Rivera- Guiterrez has been a professor in the UPR-GSPH’s Department of Health Services Administration (DHSA) since 1995, and served as the DHSA Chairperson for six years. He has also been principal investigator and director of the UPR-Center for Public Health Preparedness since 2005. Dr. Rivera-Gutiérrez was previously a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Boston (UMB), and was co-founder and associate director of the Mauricio Gaston Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy.
Jane Meza, PhD
Senior Associate Dean and Biostatistics Chair, College of Public Health at University of Nebraska Medical Center
Dr. Meza’s methodological research focuses on statistical issues related to small-area estimation. These methods have been extended to disease mapping applications and combining national and state data to estimate the probability of a rare event.
Josiah D. Rich, MD, MPH
Professor of Medicine, Professor of Epidemiology, Brown University Warren Alpert Medical School
Dr. Rich is a Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and Attending Physician at The Miriam Hospital with expertise in infectious diseases and addiction. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed publications, predominantly in the overlap between infectious diseases, addictions and incarceration. He is Principal Investigator of three R01’s, one R21 and a K24 all focused on incarcerated populations. He is the Director and Co-founder of The Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at The Miriam Hospital Immunology Center (www.prisonerhealth.org). He is also a Co-Founder of the nationwide Centers for AIDS Research (CFAR) collaboration in HIV in corrections (CFAR/CHIC) initiative. Dr. Rich has advocated for public health policy changes to improve the health of people with addiction, including improving legal access to sterile syringes and increasing drug treatment for the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated populations.
Alyssa Robillard, PhD
Associate Professor, University of South Carolina
Dr. Robillard's research focuses on HIV prevention, sexual health, racial/ethnic health disparities, youth and adult incarceration, media, and youth risk behavior. Prior to her role at the University of South Carolina, Dr. Robillard was an Associate Professor of Health, African & African American Studies at the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University and an Assistant Professor of Health, African & African American Studies at the Southwest Interdisciplinary Research Center.
Anne Spaulding, MD, MPH
Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine, Emory University Rollins School of Public Health
Dr. Spaulding is a physician-researcher who has worked in the area of HIV among incarcerated persons for the past sixteen years. She served as medical director for the Rhode Island Department of Corrections, a combined jail/prison system, for the first five and a half years after her fellowship training in infectious disease. After spending two years at the Centers for Disease Control, where she focused on correctional public health, she assumed the position of Associate Medical Director in the Georgia Prison System. She joined the Department of Epidemiology at Rollins School of Public Health in October 2005. Projects have included serving as Principal Investigator for Evaluation and Support Center of a $22M, six year initiative funded by Health Resources and Services Administration on linkage of jail inmates to HIV primary care and a CDC-funded project to integrate HIV testing and the intake process at Fulton County Jail. That project gave over 50 persons, including many Black men who have sex with men, the opportunity to learn for the first time that they were HIV infected. She is currently rolling out a National Institute of Drug Addiction-funded feasibility study of an intervention to enhance linkage to care for HIV infected jail detainees. She has authored over 50 papers on infectious diseases and other health issues specific to correctional settings. Her course on Correctional Health Epidemiology is coordinated with a similar course at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health.
Linda Teplin, PhD
Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Northwestern University
Dr Teplin is the Director of the Health Disparities and Public Policy Program in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. She is the Primary Investigator for the Northwestern Project, the first large-scale longitudinal study of mental health needs and outcomes of delinquent youth after detention. For nearly two decades, the Northwestern Project has tracked and re-interviewed nearly 2000 participants, first recruited when they entered the Cook County Temporary Juvenile Detention center when they were ages 10-18 years. The Northwestern Project assesses a broad range of outcomes, including psychiatric disorders, trajectories of substance abuse, patterns of service utilization, violence, HIV/AIDS, and death rates. Her research interests include HIV Infection; Health Disparities; Mental Health; Mental Health Service Utilization; Public Health; Public Policy; Social science; Substance Use Disorders.
Assistant Professor of Medicine, Yale University
Dr. Wang’s research focuses on promoting health equity for vulnerable populations, especially individuals with a history of incarceration, through both prison and community based interventions. She has developed expertise in training former prisoners to become community health workers and researchers through community based participatory research methods. She is the Co-Founder of the Transitions Clinic Network, a consortium of 11 community health centers nationwide dedicated to caring for recently released prisoners and defining best practices for the health care of individuals leaving prison. In 2012, the Transitions Clinic Network was awarded the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation Award to provide care to over 5,000 high-risk, high-cost patients returning from prison and to train and employ former prisoners as community health workers. Dr. Wang is the principal investigator on a number of NIH and institute-funded research projects, including a NHLBI-funded project to improve cardiovascular outcomes in patients with a history of incarceration. She was awarded the Junior Researcher Award from the National Academic and Health Policy Conference on Correctional Health (2010) and participated in the Institute of Medicine’s Health and Incarceration Workshop (2012).