Affiliated Faculty

Dr. Daniel Giovenco is a behavioral scientist whose research uses geographical information systems, field data collection, and survey data to identify social and environmental determinants of tobacco use disparities. His specific areas of interest include the marketing of non-cigarette tobacco products in diverse communities, the public health implications of tobacco harm reduction, and the co-use of marijuana and tobacco. Dr. Giovenco's research has been published in leading public health journals such as the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the Journal of Adolescent Health, and the American Journal of Epidemiology. He has been invited as an expert speaker to present his research on electronic cigarettes at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. In addition to research, Dr. Giovenco teaches graduate courses in program planning and evaluation. He is a member of the Prevention, Control and Disparities Program at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center and holds a faculty appointment at the Columbia Population Research Center. Dr. Giovenco is a 2016 recipient of the NIH Director's Early Independence Award, a grant from the National Institutes of Health awarded to junior scientists who have the intellect, scientific creativity, drive and maturity to flourish independently without the need for traditional post-doctoral training. His project will examine how the promotion of tobacco products with varying levels of risk differs across neighborhoods and how this may influence harm reduction behaviors and subsequent health disparities.

Katherine M. Keyes, PhD, is an associate professor of epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Katherine's research focuses on life course epidemiology with particular attention to psychiatric disorders, including examination of fetal origins of child and adult health, long-term outcomes of adverse childhood environments, and cross-generational cohort effects on substance use, mental health, and chronic disease. She is particularly interested in the development of epidemiological theory to measure and elucidate the drivers of population health. Katherine is an expert in methodological issues in age-period-cohort effect estimation, and her empirical work in age-period-cohort effect has examined a range of outcomes including obesity, perinatal outcomes, substance use disorders, and psychological distress. She is the author of more than 170 peer-reviewed publications as well as two textbooks published by Oxford University Press with co-author Sandro Galea: "Epidemiology Matters: A New Introduction to Methodological Foundation"(http://epidemiologymatters.org/(link is external and opens in a new window)) published in 2014 and "Population Health Science" published in 2016.

Dr. Pia M. Mauro is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University. Her research focuses on substance use epidemiology, access to substance use and mental health services, behavioral health treatment integration and co-location, as well as structural and policy impacts on substance use and treatment. She is interested in health equity and working with vulnerable populations (e.g., juveniles in drug court, older adults, racial/ethnic minorities, immigrant populations, people with mental illness, people using substances). She obtained a PhD from the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Department of Epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, both supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. She has a background in psychology from the University of Notre Dame, and professional experience in SUD treatment program evaluations.

Dr. Seth Prins' two programs of research concern the collateral consequences of mass incarceration for public health, and the effects of the social division and structure of labor on mental illness. Two questions have motivated his work to date: First, what are the theoretical and methodological assumptions underlying the growing use of psychiatric categories, such as antisocial personality, to explain and assess the risk of exposure to the criminal justice system, particularly in the context of mass incarceration? Second, what can we learn about the distribution and determinants of mental illness by examining social class as a dynamic relational process, rather than an individual attribute? He is also working on a project to study the role of adolescent substance use as determinant and consequence of the school-to-prison pipeline, disentangling individual risk, social determinants, and group disparities. He explores these questions at the intersections of epidemiology, sociology, and criminology, combining theory-driven analysis with advanced quantitative methods. Dr. Prins is a social and psychiatric epidemiologist interested in pushing the boundaries of the discipline to encompass rich social theory.

Kristen Underhill is an Associate Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, and she is jointly appointed at the Mailman School of Public Health (Heilbrunn Deaprtment of Population & Family Health).  Her scholarship focuses on health law, with a particular interest in how the law influences individual decisions about risk and health behavior. She teaches health law and torts. Underhill studies how laws and regulations affect individual choices by arranging incentives, shaping opportunities, influencing underlying preferences, and communicating information about social norms. Recent projects have focused on how financial incentives influence attitudes about organ donation; the influence of implicit racial bias in altruistic decisions; dispute resolution for injuries and complaints related to biomedical research; and relationships between harm reduction and risk behavior.  She is also currently completing a five-year study of access to new HIV prevention technologies, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Underhill received her J.D. from Yale Law School in 2011, serving as editor-in-chief of the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics. Underhill also holds a D.Phil. in evidence-based social intervention from the University of Oxford, and she completed an NIH-funded postdoctoral research fellowship at Brown University's Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies.

Dr. Brooke S. West is an assistant professor at the Columbia School of Social Work and faculty affiliate of the Social Intervention Group and is on the steering committee for the Columbia Population Research Center (PRA: HIV and Reproductive Health). As a medical sociologist, Dr. West’s research focuses on the social, economic, physical and policy factors underlying inequities in health among marginalized and criminalized populations, both globally and domestically. Drawing on both social science and public health approaches, her work centers primarily on the social and structural determinants of substance use and HIV/STI, with newer work examining violence exposure and reproductive health.

Dr. West is the principal investigator on a NIDA-funded study that examines the intersection of venue-based risk and networks for substance-using women in Tijuana, Mexico, with the goal of capturing the dynamic and overlapping nature of risk environments and how connections to and movement between places can confer health risks. The integration of place-based and network methods, both of which have wide applicability for addressing health inequities in diverse settings, will inform the development of novel intervention approaches that seek to reshape environments and create safer spaces. Dr. West also works on projects related to overdose among women and the health of women more broadly, including the evaluation and development of sexual and reproductive health programs in Kenya, South Africa, Zambia, and the United States.

Before joining the School of Social Work, Dr. West was an assistant professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) with a dual appointment in the Department of Sociology. Prior to her appointment at UCSD she was a postdoctoral fellow on a T32 focused on substance use and infectious diseases. Dr. West received her PhD in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and her MA in Sociology from Cornell University.

Dr. Philbin is a social and behavioral scientist at the University of California, San Francisco whose research focuses on how social policies and clinical practices influence health equity, particularly in substance use and HIV/AIDS. With over 15 years of experience in health disparities research, she explores the effects of community, institutional, and state-level factors on health outcomes among sexual and gender minority youth and pregnant people. Dr. Philbin holds an MHS and PhD from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University. She currently co-leads a NIDA-funded study on opioid policies and their impact on pregnant individuals, and she leads multiple NIH-funded projects addressing substance use, mental health, and HIV treatment, for which she received the 2021 NIH Office of Disease Prevention Early Stage Investigator Lecture Award.

Gina M. Wingood, ScD, MPH, is the Sidney and Helaine Lerner Professor of Public Health Promotion, Director of the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion, Director of the Health Communication Certificate, Director of the T32 on Social Determinants of HIV, and Co-Director of the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies. Dr. Wingood is a distinguished researcher and academic leader in the health promotion field, with decades of expertise designing, evaluating, and disseminating interventions that reduce health disparities in HIV. Dr. Wingood dedicated her life to developing gender- and culturally tailored HIV prevention interventions for African American women. She has received international acclaim for her research on social determinants of health and was previously featured in Science as a highly-funded African American NIH grant recipient. Dr. Wingood's Sisters Informing Sisters about Topics in AIDS (SISTA) intervention and five other HIV prevention interventions have been endorsed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and implemented widely across the country and globally. She has been invited twice as a speaker to the White House to share her experience with evidence-based, HIV interventions. Dr. Wingood published over 350 peer-reviewed articles across a wide array of public health and medical journals and served as Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator on over 20 grants funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Dr. John R. Pamplin II is a social epidemiologist who studies the consequences of structural racism and systemic inequity on mental health and substance use outcomes. His program of research investigates drivers of racial patterning in major depression, emerging racial trends in adolescent and adult suicide, and the mental and physical health consequences of the hyper-policing of Black and Brown neighborhoods. Dr. Pamplin's research further explores policing as a determinant of racial inequities in substance use and carceral outcomes by exploring how variations in police enforcement may lead to differential effectiveness of public health laws, including those intended to reduce harms of the overdose crisis.

Paris "AJ" Adkins-Jackson, PhD MPH is a multidisciplinary community-partnered health equity researcher and Assistant Professor in the Departments of Epidemiology and Sociomedical Sciences in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Dr. AJ's research investigates the role of structural racism on healthy aging for historically marginalized populations like Black and Pacific Islander communities. Her primary project examines the role of life course adverse community-level policing exposure on psychological well-being, cognitive function, and biological aging for Black and Latinx/a/o older adults. Her secondary project tests the effectiveness of an anti-racist multilevel pre-intervention restorative program to increase community health and institutional trustworthiness through multisector community-engaged partnerships. Dr. AJ is an HBCU alumna of the psychometrics doctoral program at Morgan State University and a board member of the Society for the Analysis of African American Public Health Issues.

Dr. Shelton is a social and behavioral scientist with over 15 years of experience in health equity research, specializing in cancer health disparities and implementation science. With over 130 peer-reviewed publications, her work focuses on social and contextual factors affecting health inequities, such as medical mistrust and social networks. She leads an Implementation Science Initiative at Columbia University’s Irving Institute and is Deputy Chair of Research Strategy & Faculty Development in her department. An internationally recognized speaker and mentor, she also co-directs the Empilisweni Center for Women’s Health, advancing equitable cancer prevention globally. Dr. Shelton has been funded by numerous organizations, including NIH and the American Cancer Society.

Dr. Caleb Miles works on developing semiparametric methods for causal inference and applying them to problems in public health. His applied work is largely in HIV/AIDS, psychiatry, anesthesiology, and drug abuse. His methodological research interests include causal inference, its intersection with machine learning, mediation analysis, transportability/generalizability, and measurement error.

Daniel Malinsky's methodological research focuses mostly on causal inference: developing statistical methods and machine learning tools to support inference about the consequences of (e.g.) medical decisions, environmental & social exposures, and policies. Current research topics include graphical structure learning (a.k.a. causal discovery or causal model selection), mediation analysis, semiparametric inference, time series analysis, and missing data. Application areas of particular interest include environmental determinants of health (especially air pollution) and health disparities. Dr. Malinsky also studies algorithmic fairness: understanding and counteracting the biases introduced by data science tools deployed in socially-impactful settings. Finally, Dr. Malinsky has interests in the philosophy of science and the foundations of statistics.

Dr. Daw is a quantitative health services and policy researcher with expertise in quasi-experimental methods and the analysis of large surveys and administrative datasets. She studies how policies affect the barriers faced by reproductive-aged women and pregnant people in accessing health services, from gaining health insurance to connecting with providers and ultimately, receiving high-quality care. Her current research agenda focuses on how Medicaid policy changes and new health care delivery models can promote improved health care access, quality, and health equity in the year after childbirth. Dr. Daw leads the Postpartum Assessment of Health Survey (PAHS), a first-of-its-kind multi-state follow-up survey on maternal health in the year after birth. She is currently a principal investigator on three federal R01 grants and has received prior support from the Commonwealth Fund and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Her research has been cited in policy documents and published in leading medical, health services, and policy journals including JAMA, CMAJ, Obstetrics & Gynecology, Health Affairs, and the Journal of Health Policy, Politics and Law. Dr. Daw teaches Empirical Analysis for Health Policy to the full cohort of HPM MPH students each spring.

Katherine Elkington, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Medical Psychology (in Psychiatry) at Columbia University and a Research Scientist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. She serves as the director of the Center for Behavioral Health and Youth Justice, within the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and is the Training Director of the T32 Postdoctoral Fellowship at the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies. Dr. Elkington’s research has centered on documenting the prevalence and correlates of, and developing prevention/interventions for, mental illness, substance use/disorders, and HIV risk behaviors in highly vulnerable adolescent populations with a particular focus on youth involved in the juvenile and criminal legal systems.  Most recently, her work has concentrated on the development and evaluation of implementation interventions to increase access to and uptake of behavioral health and health services in justice-involved populations. 

Dr. Ruth Landau-Cahana is the Virginia Apgar, M.D. Professor of Anesthesiology and Chief of the Division of Obstetric Anesthesia in the Department of Anesthesiology at Columbia University Medical Center. She completed her medical degree at the Faculty of Medicine in Geneva, followed by a residency at University Hospital and a fellowship at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. Dr. Ruth Landau-Cahana is affiliated with NewYork-Presbyterian / Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where she specializes in providing advanced anesthetic care for obstetric patients and leads initiatives in obstetric anesthesia.

Stephen Crystal, Ph.D. (Harvard, 1981), is Board of Governors Professor at Rutgers University’s Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research and School of Social Work. He directs the Center for Health Services Research on Pharmacotherapy and Chronic Disease Management, focusing on mental health, aging, and health outcomes. With over 250 publications, Dr. Crystal’s influential work addresses health inequalities, gerontological policy, and prescription drug safety and effectiveness. His research has notably shaped policy understanding in aging, mental health, and Medicare/Medicaid services. Recognized nationally, he frequently advises policymakers and has made significant contributions to public health scholarship.

Ofir Livne is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University and a Research Scientist in the Division of Translational Epidemiology at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. His research focuses on psychiatric and substance use epidemiology across the lifecourse, and includes studies on the risks, social determinants, clinical correlates, and mental health outcomes of substance use, primarily cannabis use. His studies rely on data from large-scale national surveys, electronic health records (EHR), clinical samples, and online samples recruited via social media platforms.

Dr. Livne’s research is funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. He is currently Principal Investigator on a K23 Career Development Award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to assess cannabis use patterns and associations with cognitive impairment in older adults. He is interested in investigating the intersection of substance use, psychiatric disorders, and the aging population.

Dr. Livne is an adult psychiatrist. He earned his MD from Tel-Aviv University in Israel, and completed his clinical training and residency at Tel-Aviv Sourasky Medical Center in Israel and in Montefiore Medical Center (Albert Einstein College of Medicine) in New-York. He completed an MPH in epidemiology at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, and a NIDA-funded T32 postdoctoral research fellowship in the Substance Abuse Epidemiology Training Program within the Department of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University.