Director:

Etienne (Tina) Phipps, PhD is Director of the Center and Director of Medical Ethics. She is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University. Her current work focuses on cultural and ethnic diversity, health disparities, and palliative care. She has been funded by the Nathan Cummings Foundation and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Dr. Phipps serves on NIH research review panels including the Ethical Legal and Social Implications of the Human Genome Project. She participated in the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) End of Life Care video series, addressing cultural considerations and decision making at end of life. She is a co-convener to the Robert Wood Johnson Last Act’s Campaign Diversity Resource Committee which is working to promote a broader appreciation for how diversity shapes patient and provider behaviors. Dr Phipps directs the Ethics Program at Einstein Healthcare Network and is the Vice-Chair of the Institutional Review Board at Einstein Healthcare Network.

 

Program and Research Manager:

Janice Esprit is the Program and Research Manager. She supervises the administrative operations of the office. She coordinates grant-related and program financial reports, organizes and prepares research information for online completion, and centralizing research-related accounts for review and monitoring. In addition to her administrative-related duties, Janice is the link with other research officers within the network to streamline the research process. She assists investigators by overseeing the management of qualitative and quantitative database programs used in research.

 

Shana Stites, MA Research Analyst, is working towards a doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology at Chestnut Hill College. She has expertise in designing and analyzing large data sets to evaluate population-based trends and interventions. She has experience in the implementation and evaluation of public health programs, including those focusing on emergency preparedness. She is working with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology to map and understand community characteristics and community level interactions. Current projects involving GIS include community asset mapping to identify barriers and support factors for implementing community level diabetes interventions. Ms. Stites is also using GIS to study the impact of naturally occurring retirement communities (NORCs) on the social well being of seniors.

 

Samantha Wallace, MPH, graduated from Drexel University with a Master’s in Public Health. Ms. Wallace is involved in several research projects at the Center. Her responsibilities include organizing and managing research projects, enrolling and interviewing subjects, assisting in the design and conceptualization of datasets, and participating in scholarly activities, such as manuscript writing, results write-ups for presentations. Her research interests include nutrition and the built environment, specifically healthy housing and lead poisoning prevention.

 

Brook Singletary, MWS, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Master’s in Social Work. Ms. Singletary works with other Center researchers, providing research and data management support. Other responsibilities include: enrolling and interviewing subjects, building databases, assisting in data analysis, and participating in scholarly activities, such as manuscript writing and presentations. Her research interests include health disparities and nutrition.

 

Consultants:

Jessica M. Robbins, PhD joined the Center as a Research Scientist. She received her doctorate in Epidemiology and Public Health from Yale University and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania Population Studies Center. Her research topics have included: socioeconomic status and type 2 diabetes among African-American and non-Hispanic white women and men; patterns of internal migration and local mortality statistics in the United States; and the association between neighborhood poverty and mortality rates in Philadelphia. She is also serving as co-investigator of a smoking cessation intervention study in the Philadelphia Health Care Centers. Her primary research interests include: (1) socioeconomic factors in women's health; (2) population-based interventions to prevent and ameliorate the epidemic of type 2 diabetes; and (3) using data on urban health problems to inform and promote healthy public policy.