The Problem Solving Court Project Research Team consists of the following members.
Elizabeth Van Nostrand, JD
Elizabeth Van Nostrand is a former Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Fellow for excellence in public health law education. Previously, she was an attorney specializing in litigation with the United States Department of Agriculture in Washington, DC, with Thompson & Knight in Dallas, Texas, and with several small law firms in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is an active member of the Louisiana Bar. Her research interests include: legal epidemiology; public health law and ethics; emergency preparedness law; health law; and the opioid crisis.
Steven Albert, PhD, MS
Steven Albert is Professor in the Department of Behavioral and Community Health Sciences. He co-directs Pitt Public Health’s Violence Prevention Initiative, a community-based effort combining homicide review (with interaction with county agencies), street outreach (funded by local philanthropies), and a hospital-based trauma services intervention. A current project addresses work readiness among prisoners transitioning to the community through a partnership with the PA Department of Corrections, labor unions, philanthropies, and worksites. In work with the Pennsylvania Department of Health, his team developed an opioid overdose dashboard involving criminal justice populations. His research also focuses on the assessment of health outcomes in aging and chronic disease, including physical and cognitive function, health service use, and clinical decision making.
Andre Brown, PhD, MPH
Andre Brown is a qualitative research methodologist. He is also an assistant professor at Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health in the department of Behavioral and Community Health Sciences. His research examines the social and cultural factors influencing Black men’s mental health and sexual behaviors. Most recently, he served as the Qualitative Research Expert for the Allegheny County Men’s Health Initiative—a men’s health disparities and needs assessment project sponsored by the Public Health Improvement Fund of Allegheny County. In this role, he developed and implemented the qualitative data collection tools used in community conversations with male residents concerning men’s health disparities, services, and interventions. Additionally, Brown has served as a co-researcher on two NIH-funded substance abuse studies focused on how the physical and social environments affect drug use among racial minority men.
Jeanine Buchanich, PhD, MEd, MPH
Jeanine Buchanich is a nationally recognized expert in vital statistics tracing systems, nosological coding, and mortality data with particular emphasis on overdose. She has analyzed linked administrative databases and vital statistics data to gain a better understanding of overdose mortality and the opioid epidemic. Buchanich is the lead evaluator the Pennsylvania Department of Health and Philadelphia Depart of Public Health CDC-sponsored Overdose Data to Action activities and has been invited to speak on the overdose epidemic to the Pennsylvania Opioid Command Center, the Opioid Summit, and the Association of Clinical Scientists.
Brad Ray, PhD, MA
Brad Ray is a community-engaged researcher that focuses on mental health and substance use, particularly where these populations intersect with criminal-legal systems. He has published extensively on several PSC models using data from dozens of jurisdictions across the US, but particularly within Indiana, where he has also done extensive research around state overdose prevention activities. Ray has collaborated extensively with the Management Performance Hub in Indiana to link disparate statewide data sources and publish the results. He has provided substantive expertise on data linkage efforts, advising on measures and subsequent analysis for policy evaluation.
Mark Roberts, MD, MPP
Mark Roberts is a practicing internist and medical decision scientist with over 35 years of experience developing and building mathematical models of human disease, and has developed models of liver disease, hepatitis C, HIV, and multiple other diseases. He was a member of the good modeling practices task force of the Society for Medical Decision Making and the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research. Roberts was the 2014 Lifetime Career Achievement Award winner from The Society for Medical Decision Making for his contributions to decision sciences. Recently, he has collaborated with others to evaluate the opioid epidemic, and to incorporate opioid use disorders in the Framework for Reconstructing Epidemiologic Dynamics (FRED). Roberts also directs the Public Health Dynamics Laboratory (PHDL), the hub for computational modeling collaborations at Pitt Public Health. His research interests include health care financing and physician and patient incentives, transplantation, HIV care, diagnostic tests, the opioid epidemic, preventive care and tailoring clinical guidelines to individual patients.
David Galloway, MS
David Galloway is a senior Research Programmer with more than 20 years of professional programming experience. He has worked for multiple Fortune 500 companies and now works as a research programmer at the Pitt Public Health Dynamics Lab employing Agent-Based Modeling, surveys, and sensor networks to explore transmission of infectious disease and intervention strategies.
Alyssa Johnston, MPH
Alyssa Johnston serves as the Project Coordinator for this study. She works on a variety of public health projects and holds a BA from Franklin & Marshall College and an MPH from the University of Pittsburgh.