Leland Ackerson, ScD received a doctorate in social epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, writing his dissertation on cancer-related health disparities among women in India. His research centers around macro-level influences on cancer prevention and cardiovascular health, including aspects of the policy, media, and physical environments. Previous public health experiences include community organizing in Holyoke, MA, while pursuing an MPH degree at the University of Massachusetts; performing outreach work for the Connecticut Children’s Health Project; and working as a community health educator for the United States Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic. Dr. Ackerson is now an Assistant Professor of Community Health and Sustainability at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

 Kelly Blake, ScD is a health scientist in the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch of the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). There, she directs a program of research on health journalism and leads efforts to create a translational bridge between communication research and communication practice. She serves as part of the management team for NCI’s Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS), and conducts research examining how media exposure influences health behavior and attitudes toward public health policy. She also examines social determinates of health, primarily focusing on how communication inequalities and knowledge gaps exacerbate health disparities among disadvantaged populations.

Prior to re-joining NCI in 2009, Dr. Blake was a cancer prevention fellow and researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (2005-2009), working in Dr. K. Viswanath’s communication research lab as she pursued her doctoral degree. During that time, she also did private consulting work in health communication, and served as a teaching fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Before entering her doctoral program, she served as a science writer and editor in NCI’s Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, Office of the Director (2001-2005). Prior to that, she was a hospital-based public health educator and site coordinator for the West Virginia Rural Health Education Partnerships Program (1997-2001), and a health communication research fellow at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (1996-1997).

She earned a Doctor of Science degree from the Harvard School of Public Health, where her dissertation was entitled “Deconstructing Public Opinion to Inform Population Strategies in Pandemic Flu Preparedness and Tobacco Control.” She earned a master’s degree in community health education from West Virginia University and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Marshall University.

Sherrie Flynt Wallington, PhD completed her postdoctoral fellowship with the Harvard School of Public Health and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute's MassCONECT program. Her research program focused on three areas, targeting those at greatest risk for cancer disparities.

The first area focused on cancer information needs, information-seeking patterns, and barriers to information seeking. The second examined the study of new media technologies in the dissemination of cancer information. The third investigated the effects of mass media in the development, implementation, and evaluation of cancer communication interventions.

In April 2006, Dr. Flynt Wallington was awarded the Top Young Scholar Paper Award by the Kentucky Conference on Health Communication in Louisville, Kentucky for her dissertation study, "The Internet as an Emerging Patient Education Tool Among African-American Men with Prostate Cancer: An Exploratory Study." Previously, Dr. Flynt Wallington served as an adjunct professor at Howard University in the John H. Johnson School of Communications and the Howard University College of Medicine's Masters in Public Health Program. She also has held teaching and administrative positions at Bowie State University and Winston-Salem State University. She earned her undergraduate and master's degrees from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Dr. Flynt Wallington received her doctoral degree in mass communication and media studies, specializing in health communication from Howard University.

EZEQUIEL GALARCE, PhD completed a doctorate in Psychology at Johns Hopkins University. His research interests are focused on the role of communication on health beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. From a macro perspective, this includes understanding how factors such as exposure, health literacy, and socioeconomic status influence communication processes, and ultimately, health outcomes. At the individual level, Dr. Galarce is interested in further characterizing the cognitive and emotional processes involved in message processing, recollection, and persuasiveness.

Adebola Odunlami is a second year doctoral student at Harvard School of Public Health with a health communications concentration. Her broad interests lie in the intersection of culture, communication and health, including health information seeking behaviors, help seeking behaviors and health outcomes of Black immigrants. She is also interested in the ethical, legal and social implications of genomics, health literacy and risk communication. She works at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute as a Research Assistant on health communications projects with Dr Viswanath.  Before HSPH, she spent three years working as a Research Coordinator managing projects on race, ethnicity, ancestry and human genetic variation at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) of the National Institutes of Health. At NHGRI, she worked on projects that examine the comprehension and translation of genomic medicine among health professionals and the lay public. She has a MPH from the University of Michigan and a BS in Biobehavioral Health from the Pennsylvania State University.

Andy Riesenberg, MS — When activities like trudging through a foot of snow, drinking unsweetened tea, and rooting for the Red Sox became unappealing, Andy relocated from Boston to the charming, hospitable city of Atlanta. Andy joined CDC’s Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention in August 2008 as a Presidential Management Fellow and Health Communications Specialist.

At CDC, Andy leads a formative evaluation and strategic update of Moving into Action: Promoting Heart-Healthy and Stroke Free Communities – a series of policy guides that communicate legislative and organizational policy options to decision-makers across various sectors. Andy also liaises with the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) in the development of state-by-state profile and policy reports and recently presented at the 2009 Legislative Summit on the topic of "Disparities in Cardiovascular Health: What Legislators Can do to Improve Cardiovascular Health and Reduce Related Disparities."

Andy also manages projects related to audience research and social marketing. He is working with a group from CDC's National Center for Health Marketing to analyze a consumer database, identify audience segments at-risk for heart attacks, and determine what communication and media channels would be useful to reach each audience segment. He also provides technical assistance to four state health departments in the planning of their media and health communication campaigns. He is also leading a four-hour workshop at the CDC's 2009 Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention Annual Grantee Meeting on the topic  of "Innovative Strategies for Planning, Monitoring, and Evaluating Health Communication and Media Campaigns."

Susan Koch-Weser, ScD is an Assistant Professor at the Tufts University School of Medicine in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine where she has been on the faculty since 2007. There, she teaches health communication, health behavior and research methods. Her research focuses on the development of theory-based communication strategies to address the communication inequalities and knowledge gaps that exacerbate health disparities.
Dr. Koch-Weser was a cancer prevention fellow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (2005-2007), working in Dr. K. Viswanath's communication research lab where she participated in the MassCONECT program. Before beginning her fellowship she earned a Doctor of Science degree from the Harvard School of Public Health, Department of Society, Human Development, and Health. Her dissertation was entitled "Health Literacy, Word Use, and Doctor-patient Talk." During her doctoral program she was involved as a research assistant and consultant on a number of health literacy projects, and she also served as a survey coordinator to a CDC funded REACH2010 Project in Lowell, Massachusetts, where she conducted a Khmer-language behavioral risk factor survey in the Cambodian community.
Prior to beginning her graduate education Dr. Koch-Weser worked at a community-based social service agency on a substance abuse prevention project for Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees and immigrants. She also served in the Peace Corps as a community development volunteer and later a technical trainer in Thailand. She received a bachelor's degree in German Studies and Political Science from Wellesley College.

Kalahn Taylor-Clark, PhD is a Research Director at the Brookings Institution, where she leads the Racial and Ethnic Healthcare Equity Initiative in the RWJF-funded High Value Health Care Project within the Engelberg Center of Healthcare Reform. This initiative seeks to inform regional, state, and national practices for collecting and reporting race/ethnicity data and measuring health care equity.

Prior to joining Brookings, Dr. Taylor-Clark was a WK Kellogg Health Scholar at Harvard University, where her areas of research included public health communication in politically and socially marginalized populations and minority voting on healthcare issues. From 2005 to 2007, she was a lecturer at Tufts University, where she taught "Women and Health" and "The Politics of Health Disparities." Before teaching at Tufts, Dr. Taylor-Clark held a position as a researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health's Project on Biological Security and the Public, where she focused on risk communication in communities of color during public health emergencies.

Selected first-authored publications include, "News of Disparity: Content Analysis of News Coverage of African American Healthcare Inequalities in the USA, 1994-2004" (2007), "Communication Inequalities on Cancer and the Environment: Implications for Communicating Environmental Risk in Low-SEP Populations" (2007), "Confidence in Crisis: Understanding Trust in Government and Public Attitudes toward Mandatory State Health Powers" (2005), and "African Americans' Views on Health Policy: Implications for the 2004 Elections," published in Health Affairs in 2003. She completed a PhD in Health Policy and Political Analysis from Harvard University, and an MPH and BA (in International Relations and French) from Tufts University.

Junko Umihara, MD, PhD is a psychiatrist who joins the Viswanath Lab from Hakuoh University in Japan, where she is a professor and teaches "Women and Health" and "mental issues" to students who will be teachers or counselors. Prior to becoming a professor, Dr. Umihara worked at a women's clinic which she established in 1986; the first total heath care clinic for women in Japan.

She has also published books about health care and has appeared on TV and radio programs. Her areas of research are women's health care and health disparities. For the past six years, she has written a weekly column about health care and mental issues for two major Japanese newspapers. Since 2007, she has been a goodwill Ambassador for Japan's Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, giving lectures throughout Japan.

Emily Zobel Kontos, ScD, ScM is the Assistant Director of the Lung Cancer Disparities Center (LCDC) at the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Kontos also serves as a Co-Investigator within the Center focusing on interdisciplinary and community-based research that seeks to increase media coverage of disparities related to cigarette smoking as well as assess social contextual barriers to smoking cessation among racial/ethnic minorities and lower socioeconomic status individuals. Dr. Kontos’s overarching research interests are in examining communication inequalities in the context of new communication technologies and media, such as the Internet and social media, and their influence on health disparities. She also has expertise in the area of health literacy as well as the development and implementation of community-based interventions.