Research programme
Behavioural intervention research at the intersection of health services delivery and consumer informatics — designed with communities, tested in trials, and measured on whether it reaches the people the system usually misses.
Overview
My programme sits across health services research and consumer health informatics. In health services research the focus is implementation and dissemination science: how tailored, customisable and personalised services get built for chronic patients with diverse needs, how evidence-based programmes travel efficiently once they work, and how multilevel and multimodal data can be used to allocate services sensibly.
In consumer health informatics the focus is the delivery mechanism: using AI and low-cost digital tools to support personalised chronic care and self-care, improving adoption and sustained use of those tools, and integrating consumer-generated data with electronic health record data so clinical decisions rest on more than what happens in the clinic.
Approach
Disciplines
Themes
Numbered because they are cross-referenced from the home page and from project descriptions, not to imply a sequence.
Projects
Status labels are a taxonomy in WordPress, so changing a project from ongoing to completed is a dropdown rather than a layout edit.
Ongoing
A fully powered randomised trial of a WeChat-delivered caregiving programme, with personalisation of content sequence and intensity by caregiver stage and circumstance.
Ongoing
Older adults and younger family members co-produce digital stories; the collaboration builds both practical AI literacy and the ability to recognise synthetic media.
In development
An interdisciplinary project connecting environmental exposure, behavioural health and sensing technology for older residents, developed towards a federal proposal.
Completed
A training curriculum equipping community health workers to recognise early dementia signs, hold the conversation well, and connect families to diagnostic services.
Completed
A WeChat-delivered programme that reduced depressive symptoms among people living with HIV in China, with effects sustained at three-year follow-up.
Completed
Community health literacy work with racial and ethnic minority communities across Northern Virginia, led by the Fairfax County Health Department.
From the field
Research travels when it is presented, argued and defended in person — at conferences, poster sessions and community meetings.
Poster sessions · School of Public Health research meetings
Methods and expertise
Collaborations
Interventions that cross language, technology and clinical care need teams that do the same.
Impact
Over 120 peer-reviewed articles and more than 150 conference presentations. Papers on engagement mechanisms and instrument quality are used as methodological references in digital health trials beyond this lab.
Service on expert panels for NIH, NSF, HRSA and WHO. Work on patient portal uptake and eHealth measurement has been cited in discussions of how digital access is reported in national statistics.
Interventions delivered directly to caregivers, cancer survivors and immigrant communities, increasing screening and vaccination uptake and connecting families to services they were eligible for but not receiving.
Findings on adoption, sustained use and dose–response are directly applicable to anyone building consumer health products, particularly on the question of what engagement data can and cannot tell you.
Media coverage of the lab's work on college eating behaviour and dementia caregiving, plus invited public lectures including the Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture at UMass Amherst.
Doctoral and master's students who leave with published first-author papers, and community health workers trained to recognise and respond to early dementia signs.
Collaborate
The most useful first email describes the population, the question, and what you already have — data, access, or a partner organisation.