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Making Changes:
Learning from Social Science Research to Drive Behavior Change
Thursday, June 18, 2015
Speaker Bios
David Abrams
Executive Director, The Schroeder Institute for Tobacco Research and Policy Studies;
Professor, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University
David B. Abrams, PhD, is Executive Director of the Schroeder Institute for Tobacco Research
and Policy Studies at Legacy. He is also a Professor in the Department of Health, Behavior and
Society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Professor (Adjunct) at
Georgetown University Medical Center/Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. Previously,
Dr. Abrams directed the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) at the
National Institutes of Health. He holds a B.Sc. (honours) in Computer Science and Psychology
from the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, and a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology
from Rutgers University, New Jersey. He has published over 250 scholarly articles. Dr. Abrams
is author of The Tobacco Dependence Treatment Handbook: A Guide to Best Practices, a
recipient of a book of the year award. He was President of the Society for Behavioral Medicine and received their
Distinguished Scientist and Mentorship awards. Dr. Abrams also received the Joseph W. Cullen Memorial Award from
the American Society for Preventive Oncology for lifetime contributions to tobacco control. Dr. Abrams brings scientific
expertise at the conceptual, basic, applied, policy and administrative levels. His current focus is on providing scientific
leadership in tobacco control from a transdisciplinary perspective.
Susan Crate
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Department of Environmental Science & Policy
George Mason University
Susan Crate is an interdisciplinary scholar and applied anthropologist specializing in the
complex issues of human-environment interactions. She received her PhD and MA from the
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Crate is trained in cultural anthropology and human
ecology and is a practicing ethnographer and qualitative methodologist. Her specialties include
the socio-cultural implications of and responses to environmental change, cultural and political
ecology, environmental policy, sustainable rural development, and cultural transformation
through social change. She has worked with indigenous communities in Siberia since 1988 and
with Viliui Sakha or northeastern Siberia since 1991. From 2007 she has worked with
communities in Labrador, Canada, the Chesapeake Bay, USA, Wales, Kiribati and Peru. Crate is
the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles, one monograph, Cows, Kin and Globalization:
An Ethnography of Sustainability, 2006, Alta Mira Press and senior editor of the 2009 volume, Anthropology and Climate
Change: From Encounters to Actions, Left Coast Press, the latter now in its second iteration. She is an Associate Professor
on Anthropology in the Department of Environmental Science & Policy at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.
She is also a member of the AAA’s Task Force on Global Climate Change (2011-2014).
Science & Technology Policy Fellowships
American Association for the Advancement of Science
1200 New York Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20005 USA
Tel: 202 326 6700 |Fax: 202 289 4950
[email protected] | aaas.org/stpf
Lisa Evans
Scientific Workforce Diversity Manager, Office of the Director
National Institutes of Health
Lisa Evans, JD is the NIH Scientific Workforce Diversity Officer. In this position, she serves as an advisor to senior staff
within the Office for Extramural Research and in the Office of the Director, and develops policy and program
recommendations to enhance diversity by increasing the pool of individuals from underrepresented backgrounds in the
NIH funded research portfolio. Prior to coming to the NIH, Ms. Evans served as the External Compliance Manager for
the Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and as the
lead Civil Rights Analyst on Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in the Office of the Secretary of the Department of
Health and Human Services. In both positions, she supervised grantee compliance activities for consistency with agency
regulations and prevailing civil rights law. Ms. Evans received her B.A. in Political Science and Black Studies from
Amherst College, and her J.D. from Columbia University School of Law, where she was a Charles Evans Hughes Fellow
and an Earl Warren Legal Scholar. After graduating from law school, she served as a Pro Se Law Clerk in the U.S. Court
of Appeals, Second Circuit. Ms. Evans entered Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ), through the
highly competitive Attorney General's Honors Program in 1994. She was a litigator in the Educational Opportunities
Litigation Section for six years, where she formulated litigation and enforcement strategies, appeared before district court
judges, and negotiated settlement agreements in school desegregation, gender discrimination, and linguistic access cases.
Ms. Evans brought the first linguistic access case in the Civil Rights Division, and worked on the trial team that integrated
The Citadel, the formerly all-male military academy in South Carolina. Ms. Evans also represented DOJ on an Executive
Branch task force on affirmative action in education and provided advice to sister agencies.
Rebecca Firestone
Senior Technical Advisor, Strategic Research & Evaluation
Population Services International
As senior technical advisor for PSI’s Strategic Research & Evaluation team, Rebecca leads
initiatives to develop impact evaluations and supports evaluation partner management and
systematic reviews. Rebecca Firestone is trained as a social epidemiologist with area specialties
in sexual and reproductive health and non-communicable diseases. Previously she served as a
research associate with the Harvard Global Equity Initiative and coordinated a recentlypublished Lancet series on health in Southeast Asia with the China Medical Board. Rebecca’s
methodological interests are in multi-level modeling, measurement of inequality, and methods
for making causal inferences within program evaluation. She has consulted with a range of
international organizations, including PATH, UNESCO and the Ford Foundation, and she has
published a number of peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. Rebecca has a
doctorate from the Harvard School of Public Health, where she analyzed socio-economic disparities in child nutrition in
Thailand. She also holds a master’s in public health from the University of Washington. See Rebecca Firestone’s
ResearchGate page for publications and conference presentations.
Wendy Nilsen
Health Scientist Administrator, National Institutes of Health;
Program Director, National Science Foundation
Wendy Nilsen, Ph.D. is a Program Director for the Smart and Connected Health program at the
National Science Foundation. Her work focuses on the intersection of technology and health.
This includes a wide range of methods for data collection, data analytics and turning data to
knowledge. More specifically, her efforts in technlogy and health research include: serving as
the lead for the NSF/NIH Smart and Connected Health announcement, convening meetings to
address methodology in mobile technology research; serving on numerous federal technology initiatives; and, leading
training institutes. Wendy works in multiple trans-NIH initiatives in mobile and wireless health (mHealth). Some of these
activities include: coleading the NIH-NSF mPower mHealth group, convening meetings to address methodology and
barriers to the utilization of mobile technology in research; serving on numerous federal mHealth initiatives; and, leading
the mHealth training institutes. Wendy joined NIH.s Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research in June 2009 as a
health science administrator. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry (Psychology) at the University of
Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. Wendy received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Purdue University.
Kecia Thomas
Professor of Industrial-Organizational Psychology
University of Georgia
Dr. Kecia M. Thomas, Associate Dean in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the
University of Georgia (UGA), engages in research and practice to support diversity and
inclusion. She functions as senior advisor for inclusion and diversity leadership by chairing the
College’s task force on inclusion and diversity and serving as a liaison to other UGA
units/colleges on cross-institutional programs and initiatives. Dr. Thomas develops initiatives,
programs, and systems to promote a climate for racial and sexual diversity and inclusion in the college and provides
leadership and support to the Dean’s cabinet, departments, institutes, and centers related to diversity trends in higher
education and best practices. She is responsible for leading diversity climate assessments and annual reports on the
demographics of the college as well as identifying and supporting the college’s development of diversity-related grant
proposals and professional and career development opportunities for underrepresented faculty and graduate students.
Dr. Thomas’ university leadership in diversity and inclusion is supported by industrial and organizational psychology
scholarship on the recruitment of non-traditional professionals to corporate organizations, the impact of preferential
treatment on beneficiaries, and influence of perceptions of procedural justice. As author of numerous peer-reviewed
journal articles, book chapters and books including Diversity Dynamics in the Workplace and Diversity Resistance in
Organizations, she is also full professor in the department of psychology and the Institute for African American Studies.
In 2009, she was named an American Psychological Association, Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology
Fellow.
Timothy D. Wilson
Sherrell J. Aston Professor of Psychology
University of Virginia
Timothy D. Wilson is Sherrell J. Aston Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia
and an affiliated faculty at the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. He is a social
psychologist who has investigated unconscious processing, the consequences and limits of introspection, affective
forecasting, and happiness that provides important insights for behavioral change. Wilson has been an elected member of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2009 and he was an elected fellow at AAAS in 2012. In 2010 he
received the University of Virginia Distinguished Scientist Award. This year he is one of the four recipients of the
William James Fellow Award of the Association for Psychological Science, that honors APS members lifetime of
significant intellectual contributions to the basic science of psychology. In addition to his remarkable scholarship, Wilson
is an exceptional teacher and mentor who has inspired many present and future social psychologists and beyond. Wilson
is the author of several academic and popular books, including “Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive
Unconscious” (2002) and “Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change” (2011). He is also a co-author
of the best-selling text, Social Psychology, now in its seventh edition. He received his B.A. from Hampshire College and
his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.