Advisors
Your CH Advisor can offer you guidance on academic or professional matters such as course selection, academic questions and concerns, programs abroad, graduate school, or career options/goals. Additionally, you will need to meet with your advisor from time to time to obtain signatures for certain university documents. It is important to keep your advisor informed of your interests and activities.
You will be assigned to an advisor by contacting the Department Administrator, Laura Pinkham laura.pinkham@tufts.edu. Learn more about declaring the CH major.
Current List of Advisors
Leah Abrams
Assistant Professor
Department of Community Health
574 Boston Avenue, Suite 208
Email: leah.abrams@tufts.edu
Dr. Abrams is a population health and aging researcher. She came to Tufts from the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies where she was a Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow. Dr. Abrams' research and teaching interests include social epidemiology, health policy, population aging, mortality trends, work/retirement, and mental health.
Jennifer Allen
Professor
Department of Community Health
574 Boston Avenue, Suite 211-D1
Email: jennifer.allen@tufts.edu
Dr. Allen's research focuses on the development, implementation, and evaluation of community-based interventions to prevent and control chronic disease (particularly cancer) in underserved populations, with an ultimate goal of reducing health disparities. Her work emphasizes community-based participatory approaches to identify community needs and build capacity to implement community-driven solutions. Her work also includes the design of innovative strategies for ensuring wide-scale and equitable dissemination of evidence-based interventions to address health disparities. She is currently working on a number of studies that involve the development and testing of web-applications and social media to disseminate health information.
Talha Ali
Assistant Professor
Department of Community Health
574 Boston Avenue, Suite 208
Email: talha.ali@tufts.edu
Dr. Ali is a social epidemiologist. Dr. Ali’s research interests include (1) examining the impact of structural racism on racial/ethnic disparities in cognitive aging and dementia; (2) investigating the role of social support networks for physical and cognitive health in late life; and (3) caregiving networks of older adults with and without dementia.
John Fu
Professor and Chair
Department of Community Health
574 Boston Avenue, Suite 208
Email: john.fu@tufts.edu
Dr. Fu is a biostatistician who has been teaching and studying biostatistics for two decades. He has innovatively applied advanced statistical methods to the studies of pressing issues in public health. His areas of interest in biostatistics include categorical data analysis, longitudinal data analysis, survival data analysis, and latent variable analysis. He views the population’s health through a socioecological lens and has studied health determinants at different levels in society. His substantive areas of interest are in major depression and substance use disorders. His research addresses how genetic, behavioral, environmental, and societal factors contribute to major depression and substance dependence. His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and Alzheimer’s Association.
Keren Ladin
Assistant Professor
Departments of Community Health
574 Boston Avenue, Suite 208
Email: keren.ladin@tufts.edu
Dr. Ladin's research examines how social networks affect health and health care decision-making. Specifically, her research examines socioeconomic and disparities in transplantation, immigrant health, mental health treatment, and aging. She completed her PhD in Health Policy and Ethics at Harvard University, and holds a Master's degree in Population and International Health from the Harvard School of Public Health. Prof. Ladin is also the Director of the Lab for Research on Ethics, Aging, and Community Health (REACH Lab) at Tufts University. She is available to advise students with particular interests in occupational therapy or other health professions, ethics, or health disparities.
Amy Lischko
Professor of the Practice
Departments of Community Health
574 Boston Avenue, Suite 208
Email: amy.lischko@tufts.edu
Amy Lischko is a consultant and frequent speaker on the subject of health care reform. In the past several years, she has spoken at many national policy conferences and has provided consulting services to Academy Health, Mathematica Policy Research, the National Governor’s Association, and individual states. Amy was formerly the Commissioner of Health Care Finance and Policy and the Director of Health Care Policy under governor Mitt Romney. She served in senior positions in the Commonwealth for over 14 years. In her roles with the Commonwealth, Amy provided leadership during the rapid restructuring of the Massachusetts health care system. Some of the activities she was involved in include: Spearheading the Commonwealth’s efforts to provide greater transparency to provider cost and quality information; Key member of the governor’s team who crafted the administration’s innovative health care reform bill in Massachusetts; Principal investigator on numerous federal and private grants to improve access to health insurance, and improve the delivery of health care services; Facilitated collaborative efforts with public and private organizations to implement quality improvement initiatives across the health care system. Amy’s research activities include developing and evaluating strategies to increase access to health insurance and to make health care more affordable. She is also interested in making academic research more accessible to policymakers.
Elizabeth Marfeo
Associate Professor
Department of Community Health
574 Boston Avenue, Suite 208
Dr. Marfeo is a health services researcher with expertise in development and psychometric evaluation of patient reported outcomes measures (PROMs) and health policy and advocacy research to investigate facilitators of productive aging across the adult lifespan. Dr. Marfeo’s research specialization and clinical background as an occupational therapist allow her to bridge gaps between health services research and clinical applications of that research. Dr. Marfeo has expertise in both quantitative (using SAS, Excel, and SPSS software) and qualitative methods (focus groups, cognitive testing, and in-depth interviews). Dr. Marfeo uses both primary data collection and secondary analysis of national datasets in her research lab. Dr. Marfeo’s interdisciplinary research approach integrates paradigms of disability, aging, public health, and rehabilitation sciences.
Shalini Tendulkar
Senior Lecturer
Department of Community Health
574 Boston Avenue, Suite 208
Email: shalini.tendulkar@tufts.edu
Dr. Tendulkar's interests include community-based participatory research, program evaluation, community interventions research and health disparities research and interventions work with immigrant and minority communities. She has a particular interest in research and evaluation projects done in partnership with communities and community-based organizations and encourages students to critically assess and be mindful of the translation of research and evaluation into practice.