Background

I am a professor at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in the Department of Psychology, the interim director of the Social Science Research Institute in the College of Social Sciences, and serve as Senior Advisor for the Health Policy Initiative. My primary research interests include understanding the role of neighborhood stress in the formation and maintenance of health disparities, ecological assessment, quantitative methods, and program evaluation. I earned a doctorate in community psychology from Georgia State University in 2010 and earned a bachelor of science degree in health science and a master of science degree in psychology from Old Dominion University. 

My research centers around ecological determinants of health-related quality of life and well-being. This line of research includes the study of individual-level factors, such as adverse childhood experiences and multiple chronic medical conditions, as well as neighborhood-level factors, such as housing, crime, and poverty. Methodologically, I utilize a range of quantitative techniques to estimate individual and contextual effects, and often pair these designs with participatory approaches to identify and address pressing issues in our communities. See my full CV here.

Education, considered as a process of forming our mental habits and our outlook on the world, is to be judged successful in proportion as its outcome approximates to this ideal; in proportion, that is to say, as it gives us a true view of our place in society, of the relation of the whole human society to its non-human environment, and of the nature of the non-human world as it is in itself apart from our own desires and interests. 

Bertrand Russell