Health Promotion Sciences

Dr. Kristen Cooksey Stowers

e-mail: kristen.cooksey@uconn.edu

Program (MS/PhD): MS, PhD

Number of openings: 1

Specific certifications/skills required: Have taken a biostatistics course. Some experience working with communities. Familiarity with social determinants of health and/or health disparities literature.

Dr. Sherry Pagoto

e-mail: sherry.pagoto@uconn.edu

Program (MS/PhD): MS, PhD

Number of openings: 1

Specific certifications/skills required: PhD – previous experience in digital health research for disease prevention (e.g., obesity, diabetes, CVD, cancer). MS – desire to prepare for PhD programs in clinical health psychology, public health, health communication, or similar.

Dr. Roman Shrestha

e-mail: roman.shrestha@uconn.edu

Research area keywords: mHealth, HIV, substance use, global health

Program (MS/PhD): PhD

Number of openings: 1

Brief description of research: We have multiple ongoing projects, both in domestic and international settings, that focus on HIV and substance use prevention using mHealth technologies as an innovative platform to scale-up prevention efforts in key populations (e.g., PWID, MSM, TGW). Graduate students are involved in all phases of research, including grant writing, data collection tool/survey development, recruitment, retention, data management and analyses, and manuscript writing.

Specific certifications/skills required: Bachelor’s degree in health-related field and familiarity with statistical software such as R, SAS, or SPSS (MS); Master's degree in health-related and familiarity with statistical software such as R, SAS, or SPSS (PhD)

Dr. Molly Waring

e-mail: molly.waring@uconn.edu

Program (MS/PhD): PhD or MS

Number of openings: 1

Brief description of research: Our research focuses on health promotion among pregnant and post-partum persons and parents, particularly leveraging social media for health promotion, weight management, healthy eating, and online health misinformation. Incoming graduate students will contribute to multiple ongoing research studies including a project to develop and test the acceptability of digital messages to increase child nutrition knowledge and digital health literacy among parents. Graduate students are involved in all phases of research, including grant writing, data collection tool/survey development, recruitment, retention, data management and analyses, and manuscript writing.

Specific certifications/skills required: PhD: MS/MPH in health-related field, experience with data management and/or statistical analyses, familiarity with SAS or R. MS: Bachelor’s degree in health-related field.

Dr. Ran Xu

e-mail: ran.2.xu@uconn.edu

Research area keywords: biostatistics, systems science, data analytics, public health, health promotion

Program (MS/PhD): MS/PhD

Number of openings: 1

Brief description of research: Students will have opportunities to learn about data science and systems science approaches, and apply them to study empirical problems across various health domains, such as utilizing the state-of-the-art technology (e.g., food image recognition, human mobility tracking) to study the community food environment, applying social network analysis to understand and facilitate the design of online health interventions, modeling human behaviors during epidemics, and evaluating the impacts of various food-related policies and community interventions on public health.

Specific certifications/skills required: Have experiences and skills in statistics/biostatistics. Familiarity with statistical software such as R or STATA. Interest in public health problems.