Faculty
* Denotes a Planning Committee member.
David Ahrens, MS is a Researcher at the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. He has a Masters in Science in Industrial Relations (Labor Economics) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to his work in public health, David worked as the chief staff member of a legislative committee on health policy and as the research director of a public employee labor union with many members employed in health services.
Tracy Buchman is the Safety Director at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics and a National Incident Command System (HICS) trainer through the Center for HICS Education and Training. Additionally, she served on the National HEICS IV Project Working Group and is currently a site reviewer for the American College of Emergency Physicians/Department of Homeland Security Community Healthcare Disaster Preparedness Assessment and Training Grant.
Hillary Conley, BS*, Outreach Specialist, Office of Continuing Professional Development in Medicine and Public Health, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Robert Cradock, MA started at the survey center in 1991 and worked as an interviewer, project director, and database administrator until 1999. Before rejoining the Survey Center in 2003 as a project director, he was a researcher in the UW Medical School’s Center for Health Policy&Program Evaluation. He currently directs the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey, the asthma follow-up to BRFSS, and the Job Center satisfaction survey.
Jody Diedrich, RN, MS*, Physician Assessment and Individualized Education Program, Office of Continuing Professional Development in Medicine and Public Health, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Barbara Duerst, RN, MS* is the Associate Director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Master of Public Health Program in the School of Medicine and Public Health. She received a baccalaureate degree in nursing from Edgewood College and a Master’s Degree in community health nursing and administration from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She began her nursing career in Green County as a public health nurse and then as the county’s Health Officer. She spent 11 years working at the Wisconsin Office of Rural Health, part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health, on a variety of programs that promoted access to quality, affordable healthcare for Wisconsin’s rural residents. She also served as an Assistant Professor for UW-Extension in Green County for two years where she focused her programming on families in stress and transition and the promotion of healthy lifestyles.
Jennifer Dykema, Ph.D. is an Associate Scientist and Survey Unit Coordinator for the University of Wisconsin Survey Center and the Center for Demography and Ecology. She has taught research methods at the UW and the Summer Institute of the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan.
Kelly Elver, BA has been a project director for the UWSC since 2000. Before joining the UWSC, she worked as a Research Program Manager for the Family Stress, Coping and Health Project in the UW School of Human Ecology for 11 years. Kelly has directed both mail and phone surveys for the Survey Center.
Donna Friedsam, MPH, Researcher and Associate Director for Health Policy, Population Health Institute, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine & Public Health. Ms. Friedsam has worked extensively on access to and financing of health care and the organization of delivery systems. She consults widely in the public and private sector on state government programs and on financing reform initiatives, health care quality, and data reporting.
Currently, Ms. Friedsam serves as a lead consultant on the evaluation of Wisconsin’s BadgerCare Plus health insurance expansion program. She also is a lead consultant to the Governor’s eHealth Quality and Patient Safety Board, and directs the UW’s Evidence-Based Health Policy Project. She collaborates with the Great Lakes Inter-Tribal Council on an NIH-supported Native American Research Center for Health, serving as the UWSMPH representative on behalf of a team of faculty, scientists, and researchers.
Ms. Friedsam has served as Executive Director of the Wisconsin Primary Health Care Association, Director of a managed care demonstration project, and manager of several projects supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Ms. Friedsam holds a masters degree in public health policy and administration from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Ms. Friedsam’s research interests include health care financing, costs, quality and access to care; disparities in health status and health care utilization; Medicaid and other safety net programs; care delivery setting and its relationship to continuity, quality and outcomes. She has published work in pier-reviewed journals and through practice-oriented formats. Her bio page lists recent publications and current projects.
LeaRae Galarowicz, MS, RN-BC*, Clinical Professor and Manager, University of Wisconsin-Madison Continuing Education in Nursing.
Joyce Hart, BS*, Outreach Specialist, Office of Continuing Professional Development in Medicine and Public Health, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Jane Lindner, BA*, Outreach Specialist, Office of Continuing Professional Development in Medicine and Public Health, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Robert J. McDermott received his B.S. (1975), M.S. (1977), and Ph.D. (1981) degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. From 1981 to 1986, he was a faculty member in the Department of Health Education, at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Dr. McDermott came to the University of South Florida College of Public Health in 1986, and served as Chair of the Department of Community and Family Health between 1993 and 2003. In 1998, he headed an effort that successfully led to being awarded a Prevention Research Center by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and he continues to serve as co-Director of this Center. Dr. McDermott is a Fellow of the American School Health Association (1988), the American Academy of Health Behavior (1998), the Royal Institute of Public Health (2002), the American Association for Health Education (2005), and the Royal Society for Health Promotion (2007). In 2004, he founded a new E-journal for the public health community of Florida, the Florida Public Health Review. In August 2005 he became Editor of the American Journal of Health Education sponsored by AAHE. In addition to more than 200 scientific articles, he has written over 50 book chapters, and three books, two of which appeared in multiple editions.
George C. Mejicano, MD, MS* received his medical degree from the University of Illinois in 1990. After finishing his post-graduate clinical training at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics, he became board certified in both internal medicine and infectious diseases. He is currently an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Section of Infection Diseases in the Department of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. His clinical interests include travel, medicine, antibiotic resistance, and emerging infectious diseases.
Jonathan Patz, MD, MPH is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he directs a university-wide initiative on Global Environmental Health. He is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and also an Affiliate Scientist of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). He has served as Co-chair for the health sector expert panel of the US National Assessment on Climate Variability and Change, Convening Lead Author for the United Nations/World Bank Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and lead author on several United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports and WHO monographs on climate change.
Linda K. Pittz, BS, NREMT*, Senior Outreach Specialist, Office of Continuing Professional Development in Medicine and Public Health, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Madison, Wisconsin.
Patrick Remington, MD, MPH is a professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences and Director of the UW Population Health Institute. He completed his MD at the University of Wisconsin, MPH at the University of Minnesota, and Epidemiology Fellowship and Preventive Medicine Residency at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta. He worked as a medical epidemiologist at the CDC and as a State Epidemiologist and Chief Medical Officer for Chronic Disease at the Wisconsin Division of Health prior to joining the UW faculty. His research is related to methods used to measure the health of communities and on public health surveillance, with a focus on cancer and tobacco use. He is also the director of the UW’s new Master of Public Health Program and teaches courses on public health and monitoring population health.
Nora Cate Schaeffer, Ph.D. serves as the Faculty Director of UWSC, and is Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she teaches courses in survey research methods and conducts research on instrument design, survey measurement and interaction in the survey interview.
Charis Stephenson, BA*, Program Assistant, Master of Public Health Program, Department of Population Health Sciences, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
John Stevenson, BA has been Associate Director of UWSC since 1999. Prior to starting at UWSC, he worked as an independent research consultant for CBS News and The New York Times in New York. He has also worked as a Senior Research Specialist for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
Theresa Thompson-Colón, Ph.D. is a project director at the UWSC, and is responsible for the implementation, management, and completion of a number of large health data collection and research projects. She currently directs the Wisconsin Family Health Survey and the Puerto Rican Elderly Health Condition Project.
Ty Vannieuwenhoven, DVM, MPH is an Emergency Coordinator for the US Department of Agriculture. He is currently on Army Active Duty serving as a planning officer for the Republication National Convention. His emergency management experience includes writing national and state policy and plans for animal and public health events and serving on a national veterinary incident management team. Dr. Vannieuwenhoven has trained and exercised county responders for animal and public health incidents. He is a graduate of the UW School of Veterinary Medicine and holds a Master’s Degree from the Harvard School of Public Health.
Kristen Velyvis, MA joined the Survey Center as a project director in May of 2006. She has worked in survey research for more than 10 years and has participated in all aspects of the survey research process. Currently Kristen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Frederick J. Wenzel, MBA, FACMPE is a Distinguished Service Professor and Academic Director of the MBA program in Medical Group Management at the Graduate School of Business at the University of St. Thomas. He has received his MBA degree from the Executives. Frederick has served as the Executive Director of the Marshfield Clinic Research and Education Foundation for sixteen years and then Executive Director of the Marshfield Clinic for seventeen years. He now serves on the Clinic’s National Advisory Council and is an Advisor to the President of the Clinic. He consults to medical groups and hospital systems and has authored a number of papers and two books on medical and leadership topics.
* Denotes a Planning Committee member.