About the IDEAS Policy Research Fellows |
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Kiara Alvarez, PhD is an Instructor and Research Scientist in the Disparities Research Unit in the Department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Her research and clinical work focus on improving child and adolescent behavioral health outcomes, with an emphasis on Latinx and immigrant youth and their families. She has particular interests in the prevention of suicidal behavior and in the integration of behavioral health care across clinical and community settings serving youth. Dr. Alvarez is the principal investigator of an NIMH-funded career development award that focuses on using family-based strategies to prevent suicide among immigrant-origin youth. She is also co-principal investigator of a mixed methods participatory research project using the PhotoVoice method to elicit youth perspectives on their communities, and collaborates on multiple studies focused on identifying and reducing behavioral health disparities. Dr. Alvarez completed her psychology internship training at Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School and received her doctorate from the APA-accredited School Psychology program at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association’s Minority Fellowship Program in Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services. She holds an Ed.M. in Human Development and Psychology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a B.A. in Literature from Harvard University.
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Gracelyn Cruden, PhD, is an Early Career Scientist at the Oregon Social Learning Center. Dr. Cruden’s work aims to support the adoption and implementation of evidence-based policies and interventions to promote mental health and prevent substance misuse across the life course. She primarily develops and tests decision support tools and associated stakeholder engagement strategies. A secondary line of research explores the impact of unmet mental health service needs on well-being and compares alternatives for improving mental health service access through primary care. While completing her doctorate at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Department of Health Policy and Management, she worked with NC stakeholders to define local context shaping child and family well-being. Together, they developed a multi-criteria decision analysis tool to compare potential local responses to federal policies such as the Family First Prevention Services Act, as well as a system dynamics model that simulates the hypothesized impacts of evidence-based prevention programs on child neglect risk and protective factors. Prior to UNC, Gracelyn was a research assistant at the University of Miami and Northwestern University, where she built extensive experience in conducting structured and systematic reviews to inform the prevention of mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders among children and adolescents.
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Rebecca Lengnick-Hall, PhD is currently an NIMH-funded T32 postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Mental Health Services Research at the Brown School, Washington University in St. Louis. She received her PhD from the University of Southern California and has master’s level training in social work and public affairs. She is interested in applying innovative mixed methods to advance the concept of “bridging factors.” Bridging factors represent the connective tissue between system parts and are a recent addition to the EPIS framework.
She aims to study this new concept with the hopes of: (1) creating a pragmatic decision-making tool that helps leaders manage organizational level adaptation over the course of implementation; (2) improving our ability to select and tailor implementation strategies at the system level; and (3) informing policy and funding arrangements such that evidence-based children’s mental health services are more likely to be sustained. |
