Principal Investigator

Dr. Shah is a physician-scientist, an Associate Professor of Pediatrics, and a practicing Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrician at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Dr. Shah’s research aims to improve educational and developmental disparities with a health equity focus.

Dr. Shah received her MD from Wayne State College of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan. She trained with Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital and Lurie Children's/Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine pediatric residency programs and developmental and behavioral fellowship program at University of Chicago. She currently heads a clinical research lab which incorporates behavioral intervention design and implementation science to develop, implement, and evaluate a community-clinical linkage model to increase equitable access to educational and therapeutic services that promote developmental skills and contribute to improved health outcomes for both children and their families. A primary objective of her lab is to also create accessible and sustainable strategies supporting early childhood development (ECD) in healthcare settings serving predominantly low-income communities, both domestically and internationally.

Dr. Shah is a Fellow at the Institute for Health Research and Policy and Associate Director of Global Pediatrics at the UIC Center for Global Health. She was selected by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) to be the ECD Project Technical Advisor where she has been working with Kenya Paediatric Association (KPA) to support health care initiatives and policy work in Kenyan communities and national health care systems to support ECD. She serves as the co-chair for the Illinois Chapter of American Academy of Pediatric Early Childhood Committee and co-chairs the Advisory Board for the Chicago Children’s Museum.

Co-Investigator

Dr. Acharya is Director of the Illinois Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental Disabilities (LEND) Program (illinoislend.org), an interdisciplinary graduate-level training program to develop leaders to care and advocate for individuals with disability, funded through the Maternal Child Health Bureau. Her research themes are 1) the role of childhood, family and community adversity in the health disparities experienced by individuals with disabilities and 2) the ethics of genetic testing for disability in various contexts. As a physician, Dr. Acharya cares for individuals with developmental disabilities using a lifespan perspective from childhood to adulthood. She is particularly interested in supporting adolescents and young adults with developmental disabilities as they transition to adult-systems of care and beyond.oes here

Co-Investigator

Dr. Berbaum is an Illinoisian, born in Urbana and raised in Decatur.  He graduated from the University of Illinois with a B.S. in Psychology.  He has a Master's degree in International Relations from the University of Southern California, Master's degrees in Russian and East European Studies and in Biostatistics from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Michigan.  Dr. Berbaum joined the Institute for Health Research and Policy at UIC in 2001.  He now directs the IHRP Methodology Research Core and the Center for Clinical and Translational Science BioStatistics Core.

Amy T. Campbell, JD, MBE is the inaugural Associate Dean for Law & Health Sciences and Professor of Law at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law (UIC Law), where she also developed and now serves as faculty director of the Health Equity, Law & Policy Program (HELPP). Dean Campbell’s law school-based teaching experience includes Health Law Survey, Health Law: Structure & Financing, Health Law: Quality & Safety, Bioethics & the Law, Mental Health Law, Public Health Law, and Torts, as well as an interdisciplinary policy skills course she developed—the Health Policy Practicum. Her current scholarly interests focus on how to rethink legal/policy approaches to advance mental health and, more broadly, how to develop health policy from a therapeutic, evidence-informed, and ethical perspective. Dean Campbell was a Founding Board member of the International Society for Therapeutic Jurisprudence and now serves as its Board Chair. She was also chosen as one of sixteen fellows in the University of Illinois System’s Presidential Executive Leadership Program for the 2020-21 academic year. Dean Campbell received her law degree from Yale Law School, her Master's in Bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania, and her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Notre Dame.

Co-Investigator

Sarai Coba-Rodriguez, PhD, CFLE, is an Assistant Professor in Human Development and Learning at the Department of Educational Psychology. Her research centers on presenting a more complex, dynamic, and resilient picture of how racially-linguistically diverse families with young children support their children’s successful transition to kindergarten. Her qualitative research emphasizes families’ strengths, cultural resources, and agency in promoting their children’s education. She is also the Co-PI on a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Grant that seeks to elevate the voices of parents whose children have been excluded from child care following a 2018 Illinois law barring the use of expulsion. To learn more about her work, please visit her lab page, The Diverse Families and School Readiness Lab, which Dr. Coba directs. 

Co-Investigator

Dr. Kathleen Diviak, is a clinical health psychologist with over two decades experience in longitudinal health research. Dr. Diviak has expertise in clinical trial data collection and management, developing intervention protocols, training and supervising research staff, and assessing intervention fidelity. In addition, she has expertise in Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMA), informed consent, and survey development. Dr. Diviak has specific interest in ensuring that our research protocols and processes support high quality science and fit into the lives of the people who engage in the health behaviors or live with the health conditions we are studying. 

Kristen Kenan, MD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Illinois at Chicago.   A board-certified pediatrician, Dr. Kenan is a graduate of Howard University (BS), Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (MD), and the University of North Carolina (MPH).  She completed her pediatric residency training at the University of Chicago. In her current role, Dr. Kenan is a General Pediatrician, Co-Director of the UIC Department of Pediatric Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Task Force, and a clinical researcher. Dr. Kenan’s research interests include adverse childhood experiences, depression prevention in at-risk adolescents, and the relationship between racial trauma and depression. Dr. Kenan recognizes that there is work to be done in the areas of racial and ethnic discrimination and trauma in the community, medical education, clinical pediatrics, and research.  Dr. Kenan is working tirelessly to better understand this very complex concept in order create positive change.on goes here

Dr. Sage Kim is a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, School of Public Health, Division of Health Policy & Administration.

She is a Co-Director of the Population Health Analytics, Metrics and Evaluation (PHAME) Center; and Co-Lead of the Cancer Prevention and Control (CPC) Program for the University of Illinois Cancer Center (UICC). She also leads the Equity & Justice Workgroup for the Institute for Government and Public Affairs (IGPA).

Dr. Kim has extensive experience examining neighborhood effects on health and wellbeing, particularly the impact of crime, incarceration, and policing on neighborhoods.  Her work has advanced conceptual and methodological approaches to more accurately quantify complex and highly interrelated neighborhood conditions.

Her K award explored drug use, STI, and recidivism among women in jail. Subsequently, her R21 research examined treatment adherence among older adults with HIV who returned from corrections. Currently, she is a RWJF Interdisciplinary Research Leaders fellow, focusing on policing and crime. Her R01 explores the effects of exposure to social stress on immune responses and lung cancer risk. Dr. Kim leads transdisciplinary research in her role as an MPI of an NIMHD-funded Center for Health Equity Research (CHER).n goes here

Alan Schwartz, JD, PhD, is the Michael Reese Endowed Professor of Medical Education and Research Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Illinois Chicago. Dr. Schwartz is a cognitive psychologist and methodologist who studies medical decision making and assessment of physician performance and a lawyer focused on improving child health through medical-legal partnership. He is the Past President of the Society for Medical Decision Making, co-author of Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care and Medical Decision Making: A Physician's Guide, and the Director of APPD LEARN, an educational research network of hundreds of Pediatric residency and fellowship programs.tion goes here

Co-Investigator

Molly Martin, MD, MAPP, is a Professor of Pediatrics and a Fellow in the Institute for Health Research and Policy at the University of Illinois Chicago. Dr. Martin is an established leader in the fields of implementation science and behavioral intervention design and testing, especially as they relate to community health workers. She is also active in local and national policy efforts that target health inequities. Her research focuses on community models to improve health. Dr. Martin is the Director of the UIC Center for Clinical and Translational Science Pilot Grant Program and an Associate Director in the UIC Center for Dissemination and Implementation Science. She is particularly interested in asthma, oral health and COVID-19 in children. Dr. Martin has been the principal investigator on multiple NIH-funded projects that test community-based interventions targeting these conditions.  She served on the Board of the Chicago Asthma Consortium and held a position on the Executive Committee for Community Health Worker Section of the American Public Health Association. She currently is a member of the State of Illinois Community Health Worker Advisory Board which is formalizing community health worker workforce credentialling in Illinois. In 2023, she was honored with the Savithri and Samuel Raj Endowed Professorship in Pediatrics. As a complement to her research, Dr. Martin sees patients in the Mile Square Health Center and participates in resident and student education.

Dr. Kate Zinsser (she/hers) is a Professor of Community & Applied Developmental Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago. Dr. Zinsser directs the Social-Emotional Teaching and Learning Lab, which conducts multi-method research on settings, systems, and policies that impact young children’s early social and emotional learning. Her mixed-methods studies examine how the workplace conditions of early educators and their emotional health and teaching practices influence children’s emotional development. Dr. Zinsser is also committed to conducting community-engaged action research to end early childhood expulsion and disrupt the preschool-to-prison pipeline. She is the co-developer of the EMOTERS tool, an open-access observational assessment of emotion-focused teaching, and the author of No Longer Welcome: The Epidemic of Early Childhood Expulsion (Oxford University Press, 2022). She earned her Ph.D. in Applied Developmental Psychology from George Mason University and completed a post-doctoral fellowship through the National Academy of Education.Her work has been funded by the Institute for Education Sciences, the U.S. Department of Education, the Spencer Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the WT Grant Foundation

Project Manager

Tina is a project manager with a passion for working on research projects that strive to achieve health equity and reduce health disparities in the city of Chicago and beyond. Tina received her Masters in Public Health, with a focus on Maternal and Child Health, from University of Illinois Chicago. She also was a fellow for the Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and Related Disabilities (LEND) program. Tina ensures our patient navigators and our families are supported and the project's operations and administration are running smoothly. 

Research Coordinator

Anna is a project coordinator with experience in research, community-based healthcare, and education. She recently obtained her master’s in public health with a concentration in Community Health Sciences from University of Illinois Chicago. Anna is passionate about working to promote health and social justice for underserved communities. She is excited that this role will allow her to make meaningful contributions to improve health equity in Chicago.

Research Assistant

Devin is a graduate of the University of Illinois Chicago with a degree in American literature, having also pursued a pre-health track with the goal of attending medical school. With experience in clinical research, Devin is passionate about the intersection of healthcare and community-based services. He is particularly interested in service-oriented research, like Preschool & Me, that provide essential resources to people that need it.