Executive Team
Jerry Cochran, PhD, MSW
Dr. Cochran is a behavioral health services researcher with a strong commitment to improving care for underserved populations, particularly those affected by substance use. His career began in social services and health policy, where he worked to support limited income/resource individuals and families within health care systems. Today, his research focuses on identifying, testing, and implementing evidence-based interventions for substance use prevention and treatment, especially in rural and frontier communities and health care settings. Dr. Cochran's work spans both clinical and systems-level approaches, aiming to make health care more responsive and effective for those most in need.
Megan E. Vanneman, PhD, MPH
Dr. Vanneman studies the intended and unintended consequences of policy change on access to care, quality of care, and costs of care in publicly funded healthcare systems (VA, Medicaid), with a focus on mental health. She is trained as a health services researcher with expertise in policy, economics, organizational behavior, decision science, and informatics.
Stephanie Castro, MPH
Stephanie earned her Master of Public Health from the University of Utah in 2017. She is passionate about working with undeserved communities because of the individuals who provided assistance to her growing up as a second-generation Latina in the USA. Her interests focus on minority health and assisting underserved individuals in accessing holistic care.
Faculty
Erin D. Bouldin, PhD, MPH
Dr. Bouldin is trained as an epidemiologist and health services researcher. Her research focuses on factors that influence disability and function and ways to improve health and participation. She is particularly interested in the experiences and home- and community-based service needs of: people living with disabilities, injuries, and cognitive impairment; family caregivers; people living in rural areas; and military service members and Veterans.
Benjamin Brintz, PhD
Dr. Brintz received his PhD (’18) from Oregon State University in Statistics. As a member of the Study Design and Biostatistics Center, he regularly provides statistical consulting for research in clinical and epidemiological applications. He is particularly interested in the development of decision-making tools using machine learning.
Hanna Fanous, MD
Dr. Fanous is a board-certified internal medicine physician and a rising third-year cardiovascular disease fellow at the University of Utah Health. She earned her MD from Texas A&M University in 2020 and completed her internal medicine residency at Dell Medical School, UT Austin, in 2023. With an undergraduate subspecialty in Social Inequality, Health, and Policy, she focuses on improving healthcare outcomes and engagement among women and other underserved populations through patient education, gamification strategies, and targeted outreach. Most recently, Dr. Fanous is Principal Investigator on a study testing game-based approaches to enhance cardiovascular and metabolic health behaviors
Audrey L. Jones, PhD
Dr. Jones’ research focuses on interdisciplinary, team-based models of primary care delivery. She is trained as a health services researcher with a focus on mental health services research and policy, and medical informatics. A large portion of her work tests innovative service models to improve healthcare access, experience, and quality for recent and formerly homeless Veterans.
Barbara E. Jones, MD, MS
Dr. Jones is a pulmonary and critical care physician and health services researcher with a focus on pneumonia. As a clinician, Dr. Jones has sought diverse experiences including the rural West, the Navajo Nation, and Nepal to understand setting influences on practice variation. As a researcher, she employs several informatics methods, including population analytics, qualitative inquiry, decision support design and implementation to understand and improve decision-making in pneumonia for all patients in all settings.
Jacob Kean, PhD
Dr. Kean’s work has focused on the creation, implementation and operation of research networks and learning health systems (LHS) to improve patient-centered outcomes. This includes the development, validation and implementation of outcome measures in primary care and other clinical settings, the development and implementation of statewide electronic health record (EHR) registries, the implementation of EHR-based comparative effectiveness (i.e., practice-to-data and data-to-knowledge) paradigms, and the implementation of serial measurement and feedback paradigms to reduce unwarranted clinical practice variation (i.e., knowledge-to-practice). He serves on the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Subcommittee on Equitable Data, helping to outline a strategy for measuring equity and ensuring the equitable delivery of health care and programs across the federal government.
A. Taylor Kelley, MD, MPH, MS
Dr. Kelley’s work is focused on delivering high-quality primary care to individuals with limited income/resources and complex behavioral health needs. Stated simply, he believes every patient’s primary care and behavioral health needs should be adequately met, regardless of socioeconomic status. His current projects entail promoting interdisciplinary models of care and holistic measures of quality for individuals with substance use disorders through review of policy, direct observation of clinical encounters, and analysis of data using qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches.
Rebecca G. Kim, MD, MAS
Dr. Kim is an early-stage physician-scientist with unique training in implementation science. She has a strong clinical foundation in the care of patients with liver disease and experience in health services research. Her current research interests focus on the development of a comprehensive understanding of the role of social drivers in patients with chronic liver disease (CLD), specifically metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), and how to best address these issues to optimize the care for patients with CLD. She is committed to becoming an independently funded health services researcher in hepatology implementing interventions to reduce disproportionate health burdens in CLD.
Morgan Millar, PhD
Dr. Millar is a sociologist and survey methodologist who conducts survey research and research on cancer health gaps. She is currently leading a survey of cancer survivors aimed at identifying unmet needs, with the goal of guiding public health interventions. She collaborates with investigators across all clinical domains in the design of survey studies to enhance data quality and methodology.
Diana Naranjo, PhD, MPH
Dr. Naranjo is a Research Assistant Professor in the Division of Epidemiology at the Department of Internal Medicine within the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine, University of Utah (UU), and an early-career investigator at the VA Salt Lake City Health Care System, Informatics, Decision- Enhancement and Analytic Sciences (IDEAS) Center of Innovation (COIN). She has been working in Health Services Research for 14 years; she has been at UU and the VA Salt Lake City since September 2021. Prior to joining UU, she completed her PhD in Health Services Research (Health Systems Science Concentration) at the University of Washington School of Public Health after serving as a Health Policy Analyst at the RAND Corporation 2013-2016. She is experienced in both qualitative and quantitative methods, and the application of Dissemination and Implementation (D&I) Science theories and frameworks in conjunction with Systems Science. She uses mixed methodology as a tool to understand drivers of change in health care systems, specifically decision-making as it pertains to adopting practices and policies that improve care and reduce health care access gaps, across a variety of clinical domains.
Richard E. Nelson, PhD
Dr. Nelson is a health economist and the Associate Director of the Health Economics Core of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at the University of Utah. In addition, he is a Research Health Scientist in the IDEAS Center at the VA Salt Lake City. His research interests include the evaluation of programs to improve the health and socioeconomic stability of individuals experiencing homelessness and food insecurity as well as those living in rural areas.
Roma Bhatia, MD, MPH
Dr. Bhatia is a breast medical oncologist & health services researcher. Her research explores real-world cancer care delivery, with particular interest in identifying and addressing gaps in the receipt of optimal breast cancer treatment. She has additional interests in understanding the role of modifiable lifestyle factors and how they impact cancer outcomes. She is committed to advancing equitable, evidence-based care models that improve treatment quality and survivorship for diverse breast cancer populations.
Julia E. Szymczak, PhD
Dr. Szymczak is a medical sociologist with interests in quality and patient safety, healthcare epidemiology, infectious diseases, and implementation science. Her work, informed by sociological theory, seeks to understand and modify the social drivers of decision-making to improve healthcare quality and safety for all individuals. She is particularly interested in the adaptation of evidence-based interventions to fit the range of organizational contexts in which people receive healthcare.
Valerie M. Vaughn, MD, MS, SFHM, FACP
Dr. Vaughn is a tenured Associate Professor, the Bertram H. and Janet M. Schaap Presidential Endowed Chair, and Director of Clinical Research for the Department of Internal Medicine. A national leader in hospital medicine, Dr. Vaughn envisions a world where patient care is rapidly and iteratively improved by generating and implementing high quality, high value evidence across varied contexts with teams that are compassionate, collaborative, and transformative. Dr. Vaughn's research targets critical challenges in healthcare, focusing on reducing diagnostic error and curbing antibiotic overuse, especially during transitions of care.
Non-DOIM Faculty Affiliates
Bethany K. H. Lewis, MD, MPH
Dr. Lewis is an associate professor in the University of Utah’s Department of Dermatology with a special interest in increasing access to specialty care to underserved communities. Her subspecialty and professional interests include: acute and complex outpatient medical dermatology, store-and-forward and live video teledermatology, dermatology education of primary care providers, and global dermatology.
Bernardo Modenesi, MPH
Dr. Modenesi is an economist and biostatistician in the University of Utah’s Department of Population Health Sciences. His work is at the intersection of causal inference (CI), particularly with observational data, and machine learning (ML). In his research, he: (1) leverages ML to capture complex confounding variation, making CI estimation feasible in high-dimensional settings; and (2) applies CI principles to detect discrimination in ML models, while also developing tools to address other Responsible AI challenges.