| Postdoctoral Fellow |
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| Chrisinger, Benjamin, PhD, MUEP |
An urban planner by training, Dr. Chrisinger is committed to research that helps us understand relationships between the built environment and health, especially health disparities. He has previously examined efforts to open new supermarkets in underserved areas ("food deserts") by considering development processes, store-level outcomes, and community and customer experiences. With colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Chrisinger is currently helping analyze interactions between the food environment and healthy purchasing within the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and has also written about the role of SNAP in community development in outlets ranging from the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, to The Baltimore Sun and Planetizen. In previous collaborations, he has researched food purchasing behavior and store type interactions, the role of curbside produce vendors in low-income neighborhoods, and the prevalence of automatic external defibrillators AEDs across different land uses. Dr. Chrisinger completed his doctoral training in City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a former fellow with the Emerging Leaders in Science and Society (ELISS) Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Graduate Research Fellow with the National Science Foundation. He received undergraduate and graduate degrees in Urban and Environmental Planning from the University of Virginia. |
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| Daza, Eric J., DrPH |
Dr. Daza is interested in developing practical causal-inference methods for personalized health interventions, precision medicine, and observational studies, and to promote the design of reproducible or replicable studies. His areas of interest include iterative causal discovery/induction (e.g., applied to mobile health apps and wearable devices, just-in-time adaptive interventions, micro-randomized trials, ecological momentary assessment and experience sampling, quantified-self data, and A/B testing), Bayesian methods, and meta-analysis. |
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| Hartle, Jennifer C., DrPH, MHS, CIH |
Dr. Hartle's research investigates environmental exposures and their effects on human health, with a special focus on environmental exposures from the food system. Her research interests are in exposure science, risk assessment, and environmental epidemiology and how they can be used to inform environmental health and food system policy. Jennifer's doctoral research at Johns Hopkins focused on identifying inequities in dietary environmental exposures. For her dissertation, she examined bisphenol-A (BPA) exposures in the food system to determine vulnerable populations and to develop exposure prevention strategies. Dr. Hartle's current research projects explore environmental endocrine disrupting chemicals and obesity. |
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| Hauser, Michelle, MD, MPA |
Dr. Hauser is board certified in internal medicine and completed medical school, internal medicine residency, and a master’s of public administration at Harvard. She is also a certified chef via Le Cordon Bleu and currently serves on the Board of Directors for the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. Her research interests blend her training in medicine, public policy, nutrition, and culinary arts. They include: community-based participatory research (CBPR) utilizing lifestyle change interventions for those in underserved communities with, or at risk of, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and obesity; weight loss; access to healthy foods and safe places to exercise; teaching nutrition and cooking skills to increase intake of plant-based foods; diet quality; and medical education around lifestyle-based prevention topics. |
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| Brown-Johnson, Catherine, PhD |
As a linguist with in-depth public health communication training as well as interdisciplinary industry experience, Cati Brown-Johnson PhD brings a unique perspective to the Stanford Research Prevention Center. Brown-Johnson’s current research agenda is two-fold: evaluation and utilization of social and mobile media within the sphere of public health and tobacco control, and investigation of tobacco-related stigmas (lung cancer stigma, smoking stigma) including pilot trials of technology-based stigma reduction and health care communication interventions. Under those umbrellas, Brown-Johnson is exploring public sentiment towards gun control using a dataset of 80,000 New York Times comments, investigating information contagion for health-related messages shared on Twitter, developing and partially crowdfunding a mobile iPad game to increase positive communication between lung cancer patients and providers, and prototyping a text-based (SMS) intervention for patients aimed at increasing social connection and decrease health-related stigma. Prior to joining SPRC, Brown-Johnson spent two years at UCSF’s Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education as a NIH-funded postdoctoral fellow. After her graduation in 2006 from the University of Georgia, Brown-Johnson worked in search technology and social program evaluation start-ups in San Francisco and the Bay Area. As a linguist and social science researcher, Brown-Johnson is fundamentally curious about the way we use language to create change in our lives and in public health. |
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| Laddu, Deepika, PhD |
Dr. Laddu's research interests include physical activity, and nutrition as it relates to body composition and bone health. The focus of her dissertation included examining the longitudinal effects of total body and regional adiposity (i.e., abdominal fat, skeletal muscle fat content) on changes in bone strength and development in young females. The underlining purpose of her study was to examine whether obese children are more at risk or are protected from impaired bone development and bone-related injuries compared to their normal weight peers, and whether this relationship can be explained by their individual soft-tissue composition (e.g., fat mass, skeletal muscle mass). Dr. Laddu is currently working with Dr. Marcia Stefanick to investigate the relationship between aerobic exercise and regional adiposity (i.e., abdominal-viscera, skeletal muscle fat) on cardio-metabolic risk and bone health in post-menopausal women, with and without breast cancer. Subsequent focus will include the use of novel imaging techniques (HRpQCT; DXA) to better capture visceral adiposity and skeletal muscle fat infiltration in aging individuals belonging to the Women's Health Initiative and MrOS trials. |
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| Trepanowski, John, PhD |
Dr. Trepanowski is a meta-researcher. Put another way, John studies how errors or problems in methodology, reporting, evaluation, reproducibility and incentives reduce research efficiency. Dr. Trepanowski also studies how diets can treat obesity and prevent metabolic disease. |
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| Offringa, Lisa, PhD |
Dr. Offringa's postdoctoral research at the SPRC focuses on plant-based foods to prevent disease. Whether to treat specific issues, or to improve general health, incorporating wellness-building phytochemicals into the daily diet is a primary goal of Lisa's work at Stanford. Her projects include measuring the physiological effects of plant intake in a large clinical weight -loss trial, investigating the health and environmental benefits of local and international traditional diets, and the effect of diet choice on the human intestinal microbiota. Lisa is active in public outreach by instructing middle school students about plant-based medicines, coordinating seminars on food and health at Stanford Hospital and guiding employees in ways to eat more plant foods in Stanford’s BeWell program. At San Jose State University she taught Plant Morphology and Physiological Ecology as part of her NIH sponsored Institutional Research and Development Award. Dr. Offringa's dissertation research through The New York Botanical Garden investigated medicinal plants from Northern Thailand used by traditional healers to treat memory disorders in the elderly by applying a combination of anthropological, botanical, phytochemical and pharmacological methods. She was trained as a plant organic chemist and field botanist at San Francisco State University. At the core of her career as a researcher and educator is the preservation of biocultural diversity by emphasizing the importance of plants used for food and medicine, and raising awareness of the connection between of our food systems, our personal health and the environment. |
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| Oppezzo, Marily, MS, RD, PhD |
As a Registered Dietitian, Masters in Nutritional Science, and PhD in Educational Psychology with a focus on motivation, Dr. Oppezzo's multi-disciplinary background and experience bridges compatible disciplines and perspectives on behavior change. Marily's current project investigates the use of online social support systems to facilitate weight loss. Another line of her work investigates how the physical and structural environment can influence cognition and motivation. Under this umbrella, one research thread explores how physical movement influences cognition, specifically how walking improves creative thinking. The second thread focuses on how personally structuring one's environment can improve motivation towards habit changes. |
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