UIC IHRP Side Image

Current Fellows

Postdoctoral Fellows

 

Renee L. Beard, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow, Gerontological Public Health Training Program

E-mail:
rbeard@uic.edu

Research interests:
Cultural aspects of illness and aging, including health beliefs and behaviors, medical encounters, and illness experiences
 

Laurel B. Crown, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow, Prevention Research Training Program

E-mail:
lcrown@uic.edu

Post Research interests:
Normative and problematic adolescent sexuality and relationships
 

Karen Kaiser, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow, Cancer Education and Career Development Program

E-mail:
kkaiser1@uic.edu

Research interests:
Health disparities, cancer survivorship, research methods, and racial, ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in breast cancer mortality

Chisina Kapungu, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow, Prevention Research Training Program
 

E-mail: ckapungu@uic.edu

Research interests:
Role of individual, family and contextual factors in HIV risk exposure among urban African American adolescents
 

Sven D. Klingemann, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow, Prevention Research Training Program

E-mail:
sklingem@uic.edu
 

Research interests:
Adolescent health behaviors, and more specifically on the associations between adolescents’ social networks and both substance use and mental health
 

Tara G. Mehta, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow, Prevention Research Training Program

E-mail: tmehta@uic.edu

Research interests:
Effective models of supervision for community mental health providers working with children, adolescents, and families, which support providers in providing evidence based models of interventions with their clients to improve mental health outcomes for youth and families, cultural factors affecting development, factors involved in the development of a bicultural orientation, and immigrant issues, specifically, second generation immigrant children and adolescents
 

Kymberle Sterling, DrPH

Postdoctoral Fellow, Cancer Education and Career Development Program

E-mail:
ksterlin@uic.edu

Research interests:
Youth smoking behavior, youth substance abuse, youth health risk behaviors, social and environmental influences on youth risk behavior, cancer prevention and control, and latent variable modeling
 

Silvia Tejeda, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow, Cancer Education and Career Development Program

E-mail:
stejeda@uic.edu

Research interests:
Health disparities and health promotion in the Latino population with particular interest in developing strategies to reduce cancer risk in this population

Predoctoral Fellows

 

Dita Broz, MPH

Predoctoral Fellow, Prevention Research Training Program

E-mail:
dbroz2@uic.edu

Research interests:
Factors associated with high-risk drug use and sex behaviors among non-injecting heroin users and the transmission of HIV and other viral infections, including hepatitis B and C
 

Amy R. Eisenstein, MA

Predoctoral Fellow, Gerontological Public Health Training Program

E-mail:
aeisen3@uic.edu

Research interests:
Primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention strategies of mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease
 

Sherri L. Lavela, MPH, MBA

Predoctoral Fellow, Gerontological Public Health Training Program

E-mail:
slavel1@uic.edu

Research interests:
Gerontology, disability, aging with a disability, the aging process, the biology of aging, epidemiology, and behavioral risk surveillance
 

April Y. Oh, MPH

Predoctoral Fellow, Cancer Education and Career Development Program

E-mail:
aohms2@uic.edu

Research interests:
Racial/ethnic and socioeconomic health disparities, primary and secondary prevention of cancer through physical activity, neighborhood level influences on physical activity and urban health
 

Kimberly R. Porter, MPH

Predoctoral Fellow, Cancer Education and Career Development Program

E-mail:
kporte4@uic.edu

Research interests:
Cancer epidemiology, the effect of sociodemographic factors on quality of life in brain tumor patients and health and treatment disparities
 

Renae L. Smith-Ray, MA

Predoctoral Fellow, Gerontological Public Health Training Program

E-mail:
rsmith27@uic.edu

Research interests:
Healthy cognitive aging, whether engaging in healthy behaviors such as physical and mental activities can protect against decline of higher-order cognitive processes, including working memory, in old age.
 

Katrine L. Wallace, MA

Predoctoral Fellow, Gerontological Public Health Training Program

E-mail:
kwalla2@uic.edu

Research interests:
The nutritional epidemiology of prostate cancer, aging, and quantitative research methodology
 

Sally Weinstein, MA

Predoctoral Fellow, Prevention Research Training Program
 

E-mail:
sweins3@uic.edu

Research interests:
Adolescent emotional functioning, behavioral outcomes of affective dysregulation among adolescents, and the relationships between adolescent mood, depression, and cigarette smoking in adolescence.