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Overview | Investigators &Staff | Other Affiliate Organizations
Investigators' and Staff Biographical Information
Deborah Allen, PhD, is director of the Personal Health Division for the Thurston County Public Health and Social Services Department and leads a Chronic Disease Prevention team with expertise in epidemiology, community mobilization and policy development, the built environment, and maternal/child nutrition. Dr. Ahern's team has developed successful partnerships with schools, employers, regional planners, healthcare providers, restaurateurs, and grocers to promote policy and environmental change. Dr. Ahern is a registered dietitian.
Victor Colman, JD, is an attorney, health policy consultant, and staff coordinator for the Childhood Obesity Prevention Coalition, a broad, statewide coalition promoting policies to improve nutrition and physical activity environments and reduce childhood obesity. He was previously the senior policy advisor at the Division of Community and Family Health at the Washington State Department of Health. He also led the Washington State Nutrition Physical Activity Policy Leadership Group (NPA-PLG), a network formed to support the development, adoption, and implementation of a comprehensive and aligned set of state, regional, local, and private-sector policies that make it easier for people to choose to be physically active and to eat healthy foods. Much of his extensive public health experience has focused on supporting policy development to affect nutrition and other individual health behaviors and address policy challenges related to obesity.
Kirsten Frandsen is the nutrition and physical activity program coordinator for Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department and will bring expertise in partnering with policy makers to implement policy, systems, and environmental changes in schools, healthcare, agriculture, communities, and other sectors. Ms. Frandsen held leadership roles in the national initiatives STEPS to a Healthier US (Seattle) and Healthy Eating (Active Living) by Design, which used policy and environmental change approaches to obesity prevention. She also has experience using community-based participatory processes to engage the community in developing and implementing solutions to health problems.
Laura Hitchcock is an attorney and policy research and development specialist in the Assessment, Policy Development, and Evaluation (APDE) unit of Public Health - Seattle & King County. APDE is in the Office of the Director and strives to provide leadership and scientifically sound technical assistance for population-level community health assessment, science-based policy development, and program/policy evaluation. Laura has more than 20 years of experience in policy and advocacy work, including having served as the executive director of the Washington State Public Health Association and the policy director for the United Way of King County and on the central staff of the Seattle City Council. She also did policy work in East Africa as an environmental law advisor to the Government of Tanzania. She lives in Seattle with her husband, Jan Glick, a nonprofit management consultant, and her two young daughters.
Tricia Sexton Kovacs is the Farm-to-School program coordinator for the Washington State Department of Agriculture and will contribute to the network in the areas of agriculture, food systems, and school food service, especially in identifying and evaluating models, opportunities, and challenges for farm-to-school and school garden programs to improve nutrition and support school wellness policy implementation. Ms. Kovacs is familiar with the agriculture and food processing and distribution industries in Washington. She has also researched policies affecting school foodservice and local food procurement around the U.S. and in the United Kingdom and is currently gathering information on the regulatory frameworks and voluntary programs affecting food safety in local procurement and school gardening programs.
Claire Lane will contribute to the network expertise in food insecurity, especially increasing access to federal nutrition programs, as well as experience creating state-level policy improvements in the systems that deliver these programs. She has access to extensive county-level data sets on federal nutrition program participation rates and gaps in services. She also is closely linked with coalitions and advocates throughout Washington State that have long experience administering and advocating for these programs. As an outreach contractor for Basic Food, WIC and the federal summer meals program, as well as a range of health care programs for low-income people, WithinReach understands how access to nutrition programs can be affected by policy decisions and implementation in Washington. Additionally, she co-chairs the statewide Anti-Hunger and Nutrition Coalition, which leads legislative advocacy efforts for a range of anti-hunger issues across the state. Claire brings to UW NOPERN the resources and connections between the critical issues of childhood food insecurity, gaps in access to proven nutrition programs and obesity prevention.
Patricia Lichiello, MA, is the deputy director of the Health Marketing Research Center, a CDC center of excellence in health marketing and health communication housed in HPRC, and has a clinical faculty appointment in the UW Department of Health Services. She is the immediate past director of the UW Health Policy Analysis Program and served as the director of the program's Vital Signs of Washington's Health initiative, a public-private collaboration of stakeholders in Washington State's health system. Ms. Lichiello is a health policy analyst with a focus on the health system, the role of multiple players and information sources in legislative policy making, and budget-making's influence on policy for ensuring access to health care. She also brings expertise in media and marketing research and policy and design of the built environment. She will advise the UW NOPRN on issues related to policy analysis.
Erin MacDougall, PhD, is the Healthy Eating and Active Living program manager for Public Health - Seattle & King County. She contributes expertise in chronic disease prevention, physical activity promotion, access to healthy foods and physical activity, community food security, local food policies and planning, school nutrition, and farm to institution programs. She is a member of the Regional Food Policy Council and serves as a National Advisory Board member for Leadership for Healthy Communities. She is an IATP Food and Society Fellow.
Pablo Monsivais, PhD, MPH, is a research analyst in the UW Center for Public Health Nutrition who provides expertise in economic environments, food systems, epidemiology, and food behaviors. His current research focuses on developing and applying methods to estimate food costs and dietary expenditures and to quantify the nutritional quality of foods and diets. He is an investigator on two Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded projects examining food cost and quality and physical activity in family child care homes. He is also a member of the Seattle King County Acting Food Policy Council.
Donna Oberg, RD, MPH, is a nutrition consultant for Public Health - Seattle & King County and the King County Board of Health. She is the project manager responsible for implementing King County's menu labeling and trans fat regulations. She also staffs the King County Board of Health's School Obesity Prevention Committee, which focuses on assessing and improving the nutrition environments in schools. Ms. Oberg is a registered dietitian and has a Master of Public Health Nutrition degree from UC Berkeley.
Marilyn Sitaker, MPH Epidemiology, works as a research scientist at Battelle Seattle Research Center. In her former position as lead epidemiologist for the Chronic Disease Prevention Unit at the Washington State Department of Health, she served as science advisor, generated assessment data, developed logic models, conducted evaluations, and crafted performance measurement systems for programs that address chronic diseases and their risk factors state. She is a trained epidemiologist with 20 years of experience conducting public health surveillance, assessment, and evaluation. She was a lead evaluator for Washington's Healthy Communities program, an initiative designed to build local capacity in 12 high-risk counties to implement policy and environmental change strategies to address tobacco, nutrition and physical activity. She developed tailored workbooks for each county, featuring local data and tools to assess built environments, and she conducted trainings on its use. She also developed a conceptual framework and reporting tool for Healthy Communities sites to track progress toward policy development milestones in schools, communities, healthcare settings and worksites.