Our Research Team

Research Team Faculty

  • Project Co-Leader

    Susan DeSanto-Madeya, PhD, APRN-CNS, FAAN, is Weyker Chair, Interim Associate Dean for Graduate Programs, Associate Professor at University of Rhode Island College of Nursing. She is a nurse scholar with expertise in interdisciplinary palliative care communication, qualitative methods, and community engagement.

  • Project Co-Leader

    Jennifer Tjia, MD, MSCE, FAAHPM, is a Professor in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences at UMass Chan Medical School. Board-certified as a geriatric medicine and hospice/palliative medicine physician, Dr. Tjia has made an increasing commitment to engaging the community to address healthcare disparities. Visit her research group’s page HERE.

  • Co-Investigator

    Jeroan Allison, MD, MS, is Chair for the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences at UMass Chan Medical School. Dr. Allison is a board-certified internist who places great emphasis on improving public health at the intersection of social justice and high-quality science. For the past 30 years, his personal research is centered on health equity.

  • Co-Investigator

    Arlene Ash, PhD, is Professor and Division Chief for Biostatistics and Health Services Research in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences at the UMass Chan Medical School. She is an internationally recognized methods expert in health services research. She pioneered tools for using administrative data to monitor and manage healthcare delivery systems, including those now used by the US Medicare program.

  • Co-Investigator

    Jonggyu Baek, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Biostatistics and Health Services Research in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences at UMass Chan Medical School. He has developed several multi-level statistical models to evaluate the effects of food environments on health, but the developed models are general and can be applied in various settings of spatial data. He has expertise in statistical and computational methodologies to answer scientific questions given highly complex multi-level and/or spatial data.

  • Co-Investigator

    Zara Cooper, MD, MSc, is a trauma surgeon and surgical intensivist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where she serves as Kessler director for the Center for Surgery and Public Health and director and founder of the Center for Geriatric Surgery. She chair of the Executive Advisory Council for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the Brigham, leading system wide initiatives to improve equitable care for patients and employees and health outcomes in neighboring underserved communities.

  • Co-Investigator

    Daniel Dohan, PhD, is Professor of Health Policy, Surgery, and Humanities and Social Sciences at UCSF. His publications address medical sociology, health policy, culture and inequality, and ethnographic research methods. Dan serves as Principal Investigator of the Medical Cultures Lab which seeks to understand medical culture and advance health equity.

  • Co-Investigator

    Elizabeth Dzeng, MD, PhD, is a sociologist and hospitalist physician conducting research at the nexus of sociology, medical ethics, palliative care, health equity research, and human-centered design. She is an Associate Professor "In Residence" at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and a Senior Research Fellow at the Cicely Saunders Institute at King's College London.

  • Co-Investigator

    Suzanne Mitchell, MD, is Associate Professor of Family Medicine at UMass Chan Medical School. Her interests focus on she continued her work and research in cross cultural communication and cultural competency, transitions of care,and the impact of patient-doctor communication on health disparities, health service utilization and shared decision making behavior.

  • Co-Investigator

    Joanna ('Jo') Paladino, MD is a palliative care physician-investigator at the Mongan Institute Center for Aging and Serious Illness at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Paladino has focused her career on designing, studying, and spreading a system-level serious illness communication intervention (Serious Illness Care Program, SICP) that includes structured communication tools, clinician skills training, and systems innovations, including EHR integration. She partnered with health systems and national organizations to adapt, implement, and study SICP across specialties, clinical settings, and diverse patient populations. Dr. Paladino has experience with intervention design, mixed-methods research, and implementation science. She teaches courses at Harvard Medical School in communication skills, train-the-trainer, and implementation and lives with her husband and son in Boston, Massachusetts.

Research Team Staff

  • Project Manager

    E. Alex Granillo is the project manager of the Equity in Caregiving study. During his medical and research career, he has participated in various federally funded research study protocols in the fields of public health, epidemiology, preventive medicine, and health informatics technologies in the Department of Population & Quantitative Health Science at the UMass Chan Medical School. Alex is currently focusing on community-based participatory research and advancing health equity in caregiving.

  • Research Assisstant

    Francesca Troiani, BS is a recent college graduate of UMass Boston. She is interested in Geriatrics and Biology, learning about the aging process and how to create better outcomes for older adults. In the future she aspires to continue her education in the study of aging.

  • Research Coordinator

    Vennesa Duodu, MPH is a strong proponent of equity because she has seen firsthand what happens when individuals are provided with the resources and support that are tailored to address the factors that impact their health. She aspires to be an OB-GYN or pediatrician in the near future.  As the Community Engagement Specialist, Vennesa aims to bridge the gap between academia and research by encouraging community members to voice what equity in caregiving means to them. 

  • Research Coordinator

    Geraldine Puerto, MPH leads the project management for multiple projects in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences at UMass Chan Medical School that focus on health equity, cultural adaptations of current research projects, and increasing diversity in research participation. The work that she has found most rewarding has been those involving community members and ones that take on a participatory action research approach.

Community Leaders

  • Co-Investigator

    Martha Benitez is the Director of Health and Linguistic Equity at the Center for Health Impact (CHI)-CMAHEC in Worcester, Massachusetts. Martha brings a wealth of experience working with community organizations across Central Massachusetts. Her work with bringing community organizations and research teams to the table when it comes to building lasting collaborations is invaluable.

  • Co-Investigator

    Joanne Calista, MSW, has been the Executive Director of the Center for Health Impact (CHI)-CMAHEC in Worcester, Massachusetts for more than 20 years. Joanne has dedicated her career to addressing health disparities in community settings and has served as a direct collaborator in many local efforts to increase the professionalization of CHW workforce, increase language inclusion, and reduce health disparities around behavioral health, end of life, among many other efforts.

  • Co-Investigator

    Valerie Zolezzi-Wyndham, JD, is principal of Promoting Good LLC, Vice Chair of the Edward M. Kennedy Community Health Center, and an innovator and leader who is skillful at facilitation, coaching, and training at all organizational levels. As a medical-legal partnership practitioner, she worked with patients to address the health harming legal needs that interfere with their care and health.

Public Service Leaders

  • Co-Investigator

    Marybeth McCaffrey, JD, is principal on the Health Law & Policy solutions team of ForHealth Consulting, the public service consulting and operations division of UMass Chan Medical School. Her work focuses on health integration, long-term services and supports, Medicaid, and health technology.

  • Co-Investigator

    Lisa McDowell, MHSA, is a Senior Consultant at ForHealth Consulting and an expert in long-term services and supports, human services, and Medicaid policy consultation. She has over 25 years of experience with Medicaid and Medicare and related state and federal laws, regulations and financing, integrated care plans for elders and persons with disabilities, health service programs, and federal health care reform.

Graduate Students

  • Emmanuella Asiedu, MPH, is a first-year doctoral student at UMass Chan Medical School. Emmanuella was born in Ghana and raised in both Ghana and Senegal. She is a Clinical and Population Health Research (CPHR) PhD student. Her research interests include structural racism & health of people of color, chronic diseases, children’s environment health, and health equity.