Elizabeth Van Nostrand, JD
Elizabeth Van Nostrand is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Services Administration and Policy at Temple University College of Public Health. Before joining Temple, Van Nostrand was an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. While at Pitt, Van Nostrand was the department’s Vice Chair for Practice, Director of the MPH and JD/MPH Programs, and the Interim Director of the Center for Public Health Practice. Van Nostrand is a former Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Fellow for excellence in public health law education. Previously, she was an attorney specializing in litigation with the United States Department of Agriculture in Washington, DC, with Thompson & Knight in Dallas, Texas, and with several small law firms in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is an active member of the Louisiana Bar. Her research interests include: legal epidemiology; public health law and ethics; emergency preparedness law; health law; and the opioid crisis.
Steven Albert, PhD, MS
Steven Albert is Professor in the Department of Behavioral and Community Health Sciences. He co-directs Pitt Public Health’s Violence Prevention Initiative, a community-based effort combining homicide review (with interaction with county agencies), street outreach (funded by local philanthropies), and a hospital-based trauma services intervention. A current project addresses work readiness among prisoners transitioning to the community through a partnership with the PA Department of Corrections, labor unions, philanthropies, and worksites. In work with the Pennsylvania Department of Health, his team developed an opioid overdose dashboard involving criminal justice populations. His research also focuses on the assessment of health outcomes in aging and chronic disease, including physical and cognitive function, health service use, and clinical decision making.
Jeanine Buchanich, PhD, MEd, MPH
Jeanine Buchanich is a nationally recognized expert in vital statistics tracing systems, nosological coding, and mortality data with particular emphasis on overdose. She has analyzed linked administrative databases and vital statistics data to gain a better understanding of overdose mortality and the opioid epidemic. Buchanich is the lead evaluator the Pennsylvania Department of Health and Philadelphia Depart of Public Health CDC-sponsored Overdose Data to Action activities and has been invited to speak on the overdose epidemic to the Pennsylvania Opioid Command Center, the Opioid Summit, and the Association of Clinical Scientists.
Mark Roberts, MD, MPP
Mark Roberts is a practicing internist and medical decision scientist with over 35 years of experience developing and building mathematical models of human disease, and has developed models of liver disease, hepatitis C, HIV, and multiple other diseases. He was a member of the good modeling practices task force of the Society for Medical Decision Making and the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research. Roberts was the 2014 Lifetime Career Achievement Award winner from The Society for Medical Decision Making for his contributions to decision sciences. Recently, he has collaborated with others to evaluate the opioid epidemic, and to incorporate opioid use disorders in the Framework for Reconstructing Epidemiologic Dynamics (FRED). Roberts also directs the Public Health Dynamics Laboratory (PHDL), the hub for computational modeling collaborations at Pitt Public Health. His research interests include health care financing and physician and patient incentives, transplantation, HIV care, diagnostic tests, the opioid epidemic, preventive care and tailoring clinical guidelines to individual patients.
David Galloway, MS
David Galloway is a senior Research Programmer with more than 20 years of professional programming experience. He has worked for multiple Fortune 500 companies and now works as a research programmer at the Pitt Public Health Dynamics Lab employing Agent-Based Modeling, surveys, and sensor networks to explore transmission of infectious disease and intervention strategies.
Alyssa Johnston, MPH
Alyssa Johnston serves as the Project Manager for this study. She works on a variety of public health projects and holds a BA from Franklin & Marshall College and an MPH from the University of Pittsburgh.