Dr. Stephens is a Professor and the Helen Lowe Bamberger Colby Presidential Endowed Chair in Gerontological Nursing and serves as the director of the Utah C-PopS Research Group. As a PhD-prepared Gerontological Nurse Practitioner and Geropsychiatric Advanced Practice Nurse with over 20 years of clinical experience, she is a nationally recognized expert in the care of vulnerable older adults with complex mental and physical multi-morbidity. Her interdisciplinary community-engaged program of research is focused on improving the health and health care of this diverse population, particularly those at greatest risk for poor care transitions with unmet palliative care needs, and their caregivers. Her work employs diverse research methods including advanced quantitative analyses of large population-based datasets; qualitative research; focus groups; quality improvement; clinical trials; community-based participatory research; and implementation science.
Dr. Tay is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the College of Nursing and serves as Associate Director of the Utah C-PopS Research Group. Dr. Tay's research focuses on the implications of emerging treatments on caregiving, decision making, palliative care, and end-of-life in the context of the family. She leads the development of the Immunotherapy, Palliative, End-of-Life Treatment Utilization and Spousal Outcomes (ImmPETUS) cohort, a population-based cohort of Utah cancer patients diagnosed between 2013-2019 with lung, colorectal, breast, melanoma, bladder, and head and neck cancers.
Ken Smith is a biodemographer and Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Family Studies and Population Science at the University of Utah. He is also a Huntsman Cancer Institute Investigator and former Director of the Pedigree and Population Program at the University of Utah that develops and maintains the Utah Population Database, one of the world’s largest resources that links individual-level genealogical, medical and demographic records. He previously was the Director of Interdisciplinary Exchange for Utah Science (NEXUS) and is presently the Executive Director of the Wasatch Front Research Data Center (one of 33 secure RDCs in the nation managed by the US Census Bureau). He has long-standing interests in familial aspects of health, cancer, aging and longevity. He investigates the socio-environmental and genetic origins of aging in humans and exceptional longevity in families. His current work includes a focus on the role of early life events in affecting the mortality dynamics and the life chances and health outcomes of middle aged and older adults. His research interests extend to the effects of family, community, and socioeconomic factors affecting health outcomes, obesity, diabetes mortality, and longevity of individuals.
Dr. Hollingshaus is a Demographer at the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, where he researches, writes, and presents on Utah demographics. He is an expert in population projections, birth rates, death rates, racial and ethnic demographics, and the aging population. Dr. Hollingshaus holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Utah, with certificates in Demography and Diversity. He previously worked as a researcher at the Utah Population Database in the Huntsman Cancer Institute, identifying genetic and social factors contributing to human health and behavior. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses at the University of Utah, including Social Statistics, Epidemiology, and Demographic Methods. He has published several pieces of applied research specific to Utah, and also in multiple peer-reviewed scientific journals. Dr. Hollingshaus designs, programs, maintains, and operates Utah’s demographic projection modeling system. He is currently the Chair of the Federal-State Cooperative for Population Projections where he is proud to represent Utah. This group convenes researchers from the Census Bureau and state demography offices to improve research and communication of the country’s future population trends.
Dr. Iacob’s overarching philosophy on research and grant development is to create a collaborative environment where statisticians and investigators work together from study conception through execution. To achieve this, he takes great effort to learn about project-specific study content, attend early development meetings, and provide detailed feedback on specific aims and research plans. Dr. Iacob has provided critical support on multiple R01s and foundation grants by developing a sound study design, detailed analysis plan, and after funding, the creation and management of a practical database that facilitates data collection, quality control, and data analysis. Dr. Iacob has been involved in consistent collaborations with multiple investigators on research projects spanning from intervention development to fully powered multi-site randomized control trials (RCTs). Projects address crucial topics in healthcare including cancer, caregiving, dementia, end-of-life, postpartum depression, and diabetes.
Professor Utz completed her PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan in 2004. Before that, she completed a Master degree in gerontology (long term care administration) from Miami University, and worked as an applied research associate in Washington DC. She has been a faculty member at the University of Utah since 2004. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and has an adjunct appointment in the College of Nusing. She also serves as Director of the 'Health Society & Policy' program (an interdisciplinary undergradaute degree), Co-Director of the Consortium for Families & Health Research, and senior faculty associate for the "Family Caregiving Collaborative." In the classroom, she teaches both undergraduate and graduate students how to be better consumers and producers of researchers (research methods). She also teaches courses related to epidemiology, population studies, and families & health. She has mentored countless students, and takes great pride in providing hands-on advising so students can learn to be independent researchers. Current research interests center around her broad interdisciplinary interests in the health and aging of the American population. She is most interested in how families manage end-of-life and chronic disease care transitions. This includes work in the areas of both bereavement/widowhood and family caregiving. Her current research interests are focused on the development and testing of a self-administered, online intervention for caregivers to persons with Alzheimer's Disease & Related Dementia aimed at maximizing the benefit of respite time use.
Dr. Ellington earned her master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her PhD from the University of Utah. She is a tenured Associate Professor in the College of Nursing, a clinical psychologist, and a teacher in the nursing doctoral program at the University of Utah. She is an investigator at the Huntsman Cancer Institute and a member of the Cancer Control and Population Sciences Program.
Dr. Ellington has an interdisciplinary program of research in patient-provider communication. She has studied interpersonal health communication in a range of health care contexts and among diverse groups of health care providers, including family practice, cancer genetic counseling, poison control, and hospice home care for cancer patients. Her focus is on the communication mechanisms in patient-provider interactions which predict adherence, coping, health behaviors, psychosocial adjustment. In particular, she is interested in provider communication which facilitates the cognitive and emotional processing of health information.
Currently, Dr. Ellington’s primary focus is on the study of home-based family caregivers of cancer patients and their communication with hospice nurses. Her team is examining 1) the change in physical, psychological, and spiritual nurse-caregiver communication over the course of home-based hospice visits, 2) the nature of family caregiver-nurse reciprocity in communication, and 3) the development of participant-informed, theoretically-guided interventions for caregivers and hospice nurses. She is expanding this research to the communication of hospice and palliative care teams with families.
Dr. Cizik is a health economics and outcomes researcher (HEOR) with a primary research focus using Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) at the point of care to support surgeons and patients in preference-based (patient-centered) shared decision-making for surgical treatment decisions. Her research hopes to improve the value of healthcare by improving the surgeon/patient decision-making experience. Her clinical area has mostly focused in orthopaedic surgery, specifically spine and trauma subspecialties, but also includes all musculoskeletal care, involving complex decision-making of operative versus non-operative care versus the decision to wait and reevaluate treatment options at a future timepoint. She has collaborated with colleagues in multiple other surgical disciplines as well. Dr. Cizik has a diverse training background that includes patient-reported outcome measurement, economic modelling, health services, biostatistics, epidemiology, and public health and health policy. She has extensive experience and expertise selecting PROMs; implementing PROMS, including PROMIS measures in both academic and community care settings; enrolling patients for prospective and randomized clinical trials, and successfully collecting PROMs at longitudinal follow-up timepoints. She teaches courses related to PROMs and preference-based patient measurement and mentors medical students, residents, and graduate students in disciplines such as surgical research, epidemiology, population health, and bioengineering.
Katherine Ornstein is a professor in the School of Nursing at Johns Hopkins with joint appointments in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She received her PhD in epidemiology from Columbia University where she was a predoctoral fellow in psychiatric epidemiology. Her work is focused on improving health and healthcare for older adults with serious illness and their caregivers with a focus on advancing equity. She is a recognized expert in home-based care delivery, family and paid caregiving, dementia care and health care delivery at the end-of-life. Her research, funded by the NIH and the CDC, includes work on the downstream economic effects of health care and bereavement on families and caregivers; the epidemiology of the homebound population; burden and cost in dementia caregiving; home-based palliative care; and frailty trajectories.
Pamela Barrientos, MD (Peru), MS. is a foreign trained physician who was the head of occupational medicine in Lima Peru and previously served as a medical auditor and rural health physician in Lima Peru. Fluent in Spanish. Supports the Utah C-PopS administrative coordination and development activities by: supporting the Director and Associate Director with administrative, outreach and financial oversight; assisting research teams with grant, manuscript and abstract preparation and submission; managing CMS, IRB and RGE submissions and reports; coordinating and supporting investigators and trainees interested in using the Utah Caregiving Population dataset; organizing monthly team meetings and “proposals-in-progress”; coordinating quarterly symposium meetings with the Utah C-PopS, invited speakers, and target audiences; and supporting administrative and development activities of the methodological core.