Melody S. Goodman, MS, PhD
mgoodman@mgoodman-consulting.com
Melody received her B.S. summa cum laude in applied mathematics-statistics and economics (double major) from Stony Brook University (SBU) where she was a Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC) National Institutes of Health (NIH) Fellow. She received her M.S. in biostatistics from the Harvard School of Public Health where she was an Initiative for Minority Student Development (IMSD/NIH) Fellow. Melody received her Ph.D. from the Department of Biostatistics at Harvard University with minors in theoretical statistics and the social determinants of health disparities. She was a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development NIH Minority Pre-doctoral Fellow. Her doctoral work focused on statistical methods for community-based cancer interventions and health disparities research.
She is currently an Associate Professor of Biostatistics, in the College of Global Public Health at New York University. Dr. Goodman has been subcontracted by the National Human Genome Research Institute/NIH to analyze patterns of beliefs about the genetic causation of health conditions and health behaviors among community health center patients. Dr. Goodman was Principal Investigator on a NIH Partners in Research grant entitled Community Alliance for Research Empowering Social change (CARES).
The National Institutes of Health, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Verizon Foundation, Long Island Community Foundation, Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, and Susan G. Komen for the Cure have funded her work. She has over 70 peer-reviewed journal articles; her research findings have been published in top public health peer reviewed journals including Health & Place, Health, Education & Behavior, Obesity, Cancer Causes & Control, Social Science & Medicine, Public Health Genomics, Health Psychology and the American Journal of Public Health.
Dr. Nicoletta Alexander PhD, MPH
nalexander@mgoodman-consulting.com
Nicoletta Alexander, PhD, MPH has over 17 years of healthcare experience in both the private sector and state government. She is currently a full-time faculty member at Walden University in the School of Health Sciences, where she has served in the Masters and PhD in Public Health Programs since 2011. Immediately prior to this position, she served as the Chronic Disease Program Evaluator at the Florida Department of Health for six years. Her experience includes developing, implementing, managing, and evaluating behavioral change interventions related to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity prevention, among disparate populations. In addition to her work on these community-based projects, she specializes in evaluation plan development, assessing programmatic evaluation needs, identifying gaps in program evaluation, survey and questionnaire design for qualitative and quantitative data collection, and program logic model development. Recent projects include work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Communities Putting Prevention to Work initiative within the Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity (DNPAO), the Florida Department of Health (FDOH) and CDC’s Division of Diabetes Translation partnership evaluation, and the FDOH School District Employee Wellness Evaluation. Dr. Alexander received her Ph.D. in Health Sciences from Touro University. She received her Master of Public Health from Florida A&M University.
Michelle Anderson, Ph.D
Michelle Anderson, Ph.D. is a trained clinical psychologist with a minor in quantitative psychology. She is experienced in program evaluation, action research, and clinical trials studies. In addition to knowledge and skills with survey design and psychological assessment and analysis she has specialization in conducting large-scale needs assessments and community-wide surveys, focus groups, key informant interviews, case studies, archival data reviews, and community engagement-feedback. She has worked on projects addressing issues relevant to criminal justice, community safety and wellness, organizational well-being, and the intersection on race, ethnicity and class on health and mental health outcomes. Her current work as a project coordinator and postdoctoral fellow focuses on gender responsive treatment for women involved in the criminal justice system.
Dr. Cassandra Johnson MS, PhD
carroyo@mgoodman-consulting.com
Cassandra Arroyo, MS, PhD received her BS in Pure Mathematics from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. She received an MS in Biostatistics in 2000 and PhD in Biostatistics, with a minor in Social Epidemiology, from Harvard University in 2003 from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). As a graduate student, she was supported by an NIH IMSD grant to develop her skills in quantitative methods for community based research. She then received an NIH NSRA Minority Pre-doctoral Fellowship to explore statistical methods related to social/behavioral risk factors for diabetes among African American and Latino communities. One of the chapters in her dissertation focused on methodological issues for designing studies when two different measures of physical activity, one objective and one self-report, are used. This chapter was a result of working with the Evaluation Core (a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional collaborative team) of a community based intervention to increase fruit and vegetable intake and physical activity among low-income, post-partum women in Massachusetts.
After completing her graduate studies, she spent three years in a quantitative cardiovascular social epidemiology postdoctoral fellowship position at Morehouse School of Medicine in the Social Epidemiology Research Center. There she worked with Dr. Sharon K. Davis to address health disparities using a multi-disciplinary approach. She worked with PHSI at Morehouse College as an Adjunct Professor for Project IMHOTEP. She served as a research mentor to a student attending Morehouse through the MBRS program. The research examined rural and urban differences in prevalence of metabolic syndrome among Whites and African Americans in Georgia. She served as research mentor to students from Clark Atlanta University through MARC*USTAR, as well as students at Spelman College. She has conducted health awareness events on topics such as lupus, healthful eating, premature births, depression, and sexual health in the predominantly African American West End community and conducted the evaluations of these events for her sorority.
She was an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Masters of Public Health Program Director in the Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health at Georgia Southern University for 5 years. She is currently Core Faculty in the Ph.D. Program in Public Health at Walden University. She has taught courses in epidemiology, biostatistics and community health focused on health disparities, health equity, and social determinants of health. For more than 10 years, she has led and collaborated on externally funded community-based participatory research and evaluation projects in chronic disease prevention and management and the use of secondary data for health disparities research. Her work has been deeply rooted in the social and health issues she witnessed in her own community as a child. Through research and service, she remains committed to the idea that elimination of health disparities and creation of health equity must happen by substantially changing the social, political, ethical, and economic norms that perpetuate them.
Monica L. Clement Ph.D.
mlclement@mgoodman-consulting.com
Monica L. Clement Ph.D. is a licensed clinical neuropsychologist with expertise in clinical, research, education and leadership activities in psychology and integrated health care. Dr. Clement obtained her B.S. summa cum laude in psychology from Stony Brook University in 1999, where she was a Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC) National Institutes of Health (NIH) Fellow. She obtained her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from The Ohio State University in 2005, where she was an American Psychological Association Minority Fellowship Program (APA/MFP) Fellow. She completed her APA accredited pre-doctoral psychology internship at the Northport VA Medical Center followed by a two-year post doctoral fellowship in pediatric and adult clinical neuropsychology in a private practice affiliated with the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) Medical School and the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
She currently serves as the Associate Director of Clinical Services for the New Jersey War Related Illness and Injury Study Center (WRIISC) where her clinical, research and educational foci are on post-deployment health issues of Veterans. She is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the UMDNJ Medical School and is experienced in the evaluation and treatment of various neurological conditions, most notably mild traumatic brain injury. She also works in private practice, primarily treating adults with a variety of psychological illnesses and psychosocial complaints. She is a guest editor for the Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation and actively mentors psychology students and trainees. She is a member of APA, including APA Division 40 (clinical neuropsychology), the International Neuropsychological Society (INS) and the Association of Black Psychologists (ABPsi).
Bettina Drake, PhD, MPH
bettinafdrake@mgoodman-consulting.com
Bettina Drake, PhD, MPH is an Assistant Professor at Washington University School of Medicine and Siteman Cancer Center. Her research interests, as a cancer epidemiologist, are in reducing disparities in cancer by focusing on cancer prevention strategies through nutritional and community-based approaches. Dr. Drake received her Bachelor’s degree from Baylor University in Biochemistry with a minor in Sociology. Her Master’s of Public Health degree was obtained from the Univeristy of North Texas Health Science Center followed by her PhD in Epidemiology from the University of South Carolina. Dr. Drake completed her postdoctoral studies as an Alonzo Yerby postdoctoral fellow at Harvard School of Public Health and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Keon L. Gilbert, DrPH, MA, MPA
kgilbert@mgoodman-consulting.com
Dr. Gilbert’s key research interests include, social capital, health disparities, African American Men’s health, and interventions to prevent chronic diseases by:
(1) developing diverse partnerships to build community capacity to sustain health initiatives, (2) understanding the effects of racism at individual-and-community-levels, and the various systems that reinforce racist ideologies, (3) understanding the cultural relevance to health promotion and disease prevention, and (4) promoting the development and enhancement of social networks to improve health behaviors. Dr. Gilbert’s work draws on inter-disciplinary training in Biology, African American Studies, Public Affairs and Public Health to investigate the intersection of racial identity, racial socialization, and structural racism as an
important, yet unexplored, social determinant of African American male’s health across the lifecourse. Part of understanding this intersection is to understand cultural and structural changes within African American communities over time and to better understand the opportunities and limitations of male’s participation in formal organizations, social networks and systems of social support where they live, work and play.
Dr. Gilbert currently teaches an introduction to Behavioral Science and Eliminating Health Disparities. He is a member of the American Public Health Association and the Society for Public Health Education
Ndidi Amutah, Ph.D, MPH, CHES
Namutah@mgoodman-consulting.com
Ndidiamaka N.Amutah received her PhD in Public Health with a focus on Maternal and Child Health at the University of Maryland, College Park School of Public Health in 2010. She received her Masters in Public Health from The George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services in Maternal and Child Health in 2005. Her dissertation focused on infant mortality in Washington, DC and it specifically examined neighborhood level disadvantage, social determinants of health, and race/ethnicity as predictors of infant mortality. Dr. Amutah also received a BS in Public Health and BA in Africana Studies from Rutgers, The State University of NJ.
Currently, Dr. Amutah is an Assistant Professor at Montclair State University in the Department of Health and Nutrition Sciences. In this capacity her research focuses on adverse birth outcomes for women of color, HIV/AIDS and women of color in an urban context, and community based participatory research.