Faculty Profiles

Margarita Alegría, Ph.D., is the Director of the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research (CMMHR) at Cambridge Health Alliance, and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Alegría has devoted her professional career to researching disparities in mental health and substance abuse services for Latinos and other minority populations. A natural collaborator, Dr. Alegría has worked with investigators and researchers across the United States and Puerto Rico to generate research focused on improving the health services for Latinos. As Director of CMMHR, Dr. Alegría oversees an interdisciplinary group of researchers and scholars, including psychologists, social policy analysts, health economists, psychiatrists, data analysts, sociologists, and other professionals that assist in the research, analysis and administration of the Center projects. Dr. Alegría is currently the Principle Investigator of two NIMH-funded research studies based at the Center: The goal of the Advanced Center for Latino and Mental Health Systems Research is to formulate methods and conduct research that will contribute to designing interventions aimed at reducing disparities in mental health services among Latino populations, and the National Latino and Asian American Study (NLAAS, Takeuchi and Alegría, PIs), a large epidemiologic national study designed to estimate mental health, substance abuse disorders, and rates of mental health and health service use for a nationally representative sample of Asians and Latinos. She is also the co-Principal Investigator of the CHA/UPR Excellence in Partnerships for Community Outreach, Research on Health Disparities and Training (EXPORT) which proposes to generate and test interventions that can remedy service disparities in asthma and mental health for disadvantaged Latino and African Caribbean populations. Her published work focuses on defining and proposing solutions to disparities in mental health care services in minority populations, conceptual and methodological issues with minority populations, risk behaviors, and disparities in service delivery. Dr. Alegría was awarded the 2003 Mental Health Section Award at the 131st Meeting for the American Public Health Association. She received her Ph.D. from Temple University in 1989.

Delia Camacho, Ph.D., is the Dean for Academic Affairs, Medical Sciences Campus (MSC), University of Puerto Rico. She developed the National Model Center of Excellence (CoE) in Women's Health in Puerto Rico. One of her major achievements has been the Educational Program for Mujeres, which distributed information on prevention and treatment for common illnesses for women (e.g., osteoporosis, arthritis, pre-menstrual syndrome) and reached more than 300,000 women in different settings and geographical areas in Puerto Rico. Other outreach projects under the direction of Dr. Camacho include: The Folic Acid Educational Program, sponsored by March of Dimes and the Joint CoE-Community CoE Women's Health Project "To the Heart of Minority Women." She received her B.S. degree from the University of Puerto Rico. She also received her M.Sc. in Biology and a Ph.D. in Renal Physiology from the University of Puerto Rico.

Glorisa J. Canino, Ph.D., is a Research Consultant for the Administration of Mental Health and Addiction Services of Puerto Rico (ASSMCA), a Professor at the School of Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, and the Director of the Behavioral Sciences Research Institute, that is under the office of the Dean of Academic Affairs at the School of Medicine, University of Puerto Rico. Dr. Canino has been the principal investigator of several psychiatric epidemiological studies that have been carried out in the island since 1984. She is presently Principal investigator of a grant to investigate pediatric asthma disparities (UO1 HL072519-01), another grant designed to investigate Health Disparities among Latino and Afro-Caribbeans (P20 MD000537), and of another grant designed to investigate service use, need and outcome among Puerto Rican children (UO1 54825). She is Co-Principal Investigator of an application to study Antisocial Behavior among Island and mainland Puerto Rican children (RO1 MH 56401-01A1). She is the research director and co investigator of the Latino Research Program Project (LRPP) (Dr. Alegria is PI) and co- investigator of study of the prevalence of psychiatric disorders and health care utilization patterns of US Latinos and Asian Americans (U01 62209, Dr. Alegria, PI). She was a past reviewer (1992-1997) of the peer review committee of the Psychopathology Child and Adolescent Treatment Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health and a reviewer and/or a member of the editorial board of several scientific and peer review journals. Dr. Canino has published several papers in peer review journals in the areas of cross-cultural child and adult psychiatric epidemiology, as well as on the service utilization patterns and barriers to care faced by Latino children and adults. She has also published substantially in the area of instrument psychometrics, particularly as it relates to the adaptation and translation of instruments to the Latino culture. She has been for the past 18 years a leading Latino researcher in the field of psychiatric epidemiology, and psychometrics after having carried out four major psychiatric epidemiologic surveys in the island of Puerto Rico and translated and tested several diagnostic and service utilization measures. She has collaborated with several investigators in the U.S. and abroad in the analyzes of data sets and in the translation and adaptation of instruments.

José G. Conde, M.D., M.P.H., is Associate Professor in the Division of Graduate Studies at the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine. Since 1994 he has been Associate Director of the Research Centers in Minority Institutions (RCMI) Program at the University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus (grant G12RR03051). He is also Director of the RCMI Information Technology Resource Center at the Campus. His current interests include the deployment of collaborative research tools on Internet2. Dr. Conde received his BS in Chemistry, M.D. and M.P.H. from the University of Puerto Rico and completed his medical residency training in Preventive Medicine at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Conde has been Director of the EXPORT Training Core in Puerto Rico since January 2005.

Dharma Cortés, Ph.D, is an Instructor at Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry at Cambridge Hospital and Senior Research Associate, Mauricio Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Dr. Cortés is a member of the Health Literacy Studies Group at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a faculty advisor to H.E.A.L.T.H. NOW!, a health literacy project that trains and places Harvard Medical, Dental, and Public Health students in ESOL classes (English for Speakers of Other Languages) to teach about health issues. Dr. Cortés has conducted research with Latinos in the United States for more than 15 years. She has studied culture, mental and physical health, and health and mental health service utilization research. She is an expert in cultural adaptation and has published several papers on biculturalism in Puerto Rican adults and its relation to mental health issues. She has conducted several qualitative studies focusing on issues of culture and mental health and has developed psychological measures as a result of her qualitative work.

Lisa Fortuna, M.D., M.P.H., is a board certified child and adolescent psychiatrist originally from Puerto Rico. Dr. Fortuna is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, New Jersey Medical School. She received her M.P.H from Hunter College, New York in urban public health and community health education. She then completed her general and child psychiatry training at St. Vincent’s Hospital and Medical Center in New York City, followed by research training in health services research at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Fortuna has a long standing interest in both clinical work and research with multicultural populations, community psychiatry and alternative models for mental health access for underserved adolescent and young adults. Currently, Dr. Fortuna is a clinician –teacher in the department of child ambulatory psychiatry and a health services researcher with the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research at Cambridge Health Alliance.

Richard G. Frank, Ph.D., is the Margaret T. Morris Professor of Health Economics in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. He is also a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research. Dr. Frank is engaged in research in three general areas: 1) the economics of mental health care; 2) the economics of the pharmaceutical industry; and 3) the organization and financing of physician group practices. Richard Frank and his colleagues are examining competing strategies for organizing and financing mental health and substance abuse care under several research grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Institute of Drug Abuse. To this end, he is studying the use of financial incentives to pay plans fairly and to promote access to quality treatments for mental and addictive disorders. Under grants from the NIMH and the MacArthur Foundation, Dr. Frank and colleagues are developing a set of productivity measures for the treatment of depression and schizophrenia. His work in the area of pharmaceuticals has focused on drug pricing and the dynamics of competition. He is also conducting studies on the impact of prescription drug formularies and direct to consumer advertising of drugs and the impact of pharmaceutical innovation on treatment patterns and cost. The third area of activity involves understanding the economic and organizational factors that influence the performance of medical group practices. Dr. Frank and colleagues are studying methods of paying for performance. Dr. Frank is a member of the Institute of Medicine and serves on its Biobehavioral Sciences Board. He advises several state mental health and substance abuse agencies on issues related to managed care and financing of care. Dr. Frank was awarded the Georgescu-Roegen prize from the Southern Economic Association for his collaborative work on drug pricing, the Carl A. Taube Award from the American Public Health Association for outstanding contributions to mental health services and economics research, and the Emily Mumford Medal from Columbia University’s Department of Psychiatry. He received his B.A. degree from Bard College and his Ph.D. in economics from Boston University.

Thomas G. McGuire, Ph.D., is Professor of Health Economics in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on 1) the design and impact of health care payment systems, 2) the economics of health care disparities and 3) the economics of mental health policy. Dr. McGuire has contributed to the theory of physician, hospital, and health plan payment. His current research includes application of theoretical and empirical methods from labor economics to the area of health care disparities. He has analyzed the reasons behind "discrimination" by doctors, and conducted empirical research to identify the contribution of the various mechanisms behind health care disparities. For more than 25 years, Dr. McGuire has conducted academic and policy research on the economics of mental health. Dr. McGuire was the 1981 recipient of the Elizur Wright Award from the American Association of Risk and Insurance for his book, Financing Psychotherapy, and he has cochaired four NIMH-sponsored conferences on the Economics of Mental Health. He received the 1998 Arrow Award (joint with Albert Ma) from the International Health Economics Association. In 1991 he received the Carl Taube Award from the American Public Health Association. Dr. McGuire is a member of the Institute of Medicine, and a co-editor of the Journal of Health Economics. Dr. McGuire received his A.B. degree from Princeton and his Ph.D. degree in economics from Yale University.

Norah Mulvaney-Day, Ph.D., is a social policy analyst and mental health services researcher, and currently holds the position of Associate Director at the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research. Dr. Mulvaney-Day has a background in community based research, participatory research and health care systems analysis. Her experience includes research and outreach in multi-ethnic communities of intravenous drug users as part of an HIV prevention program, as well as work with a community-based alcohol and drug awareness prevention and education group. She has extensive experience developing surveys and research projects in collaboration with community groups. She has worked with members of a family mental health advocacy group to develop a needs assessment project for the development of financial trust program for parents of adult children with serious mental illness, and developed and administered a large national survey in collaboration with members from a national family advocacy organization to measure the economic costs of serious mental illness to the family. Her work at the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research has included pilot testing a cultural competency assessment tool at different levels of the hospital system, and a participatory systems enhancement project to improve special education services for disruptive children in a public school setting. Dr. Mulvaney-Day received her Ph.D. in mental health policy from Brandeis University in 2002, where she was an NIMH trainee in mental health services research and the recipient of the Minkoff Award for the best dissertation in health economics.

Sharon-Lise Normand, Ph.D., is Professor of Health Care Policy (Biostatistics) at Harvard Medical School and in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Normand's research focuses on the development of statistical methods for health services research, primarily using Bayesian approaches to problem solving, including assessment of quality of care, methods for causal inference, provider profiling, meta-analysis, and latent variable modeling. She has developed a long line of research on methods for the analysis of patterns of treatment and quality of care for patients with cardiovascular disease and with mental disorders. Dr. Normand has developed analytic approaches for comparing providers using outcomes and process-based measures, and for determining the appropriate unit of analysis, e.g., hospital-level or physician-level analysis. She is the Director of Mass-DAC, the data-coordinating center responsible for collecting, analyzing, and reporting on the quality of care for adults discharged following a cardiac procedure from all hospitals in Massachusetts. In terms of methodological projects, she is developing methods, using elicitation as well as regression techniques, to construct price indexes for mental health treatments. She is leading the effort to examine the appropriateness of the assumptions in making causal inference using pre-post observational data. She is extending and applying methods for making causal inference in both the experimental and observational settings using propensity scores and instrumental variables techniques in order to learn about the effectiveness of treatments for major depression and for schizophrenia. Dr. Normand is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association as well as a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology. She is a member of the Massachusetts Cardiac Care Advisory Commission, serves on task forces for the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology, and is a member of the FDA’s Circulatory Systems Devices Advisory Panel. Dr. Normand earned her A.B. and M.S. degrees in statistics from the University of Western Ontario and her Ph.D. in biostatistics from the University of Toronto.

Victoria Ojeda, Ph.D., M.P.H., is a National Institute of Mental Health Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Health Care Policy and is based in the Harvard Medical School. At Harvard, Victoria’s research focuses on determinants of racial and ethnic disparities in utilization of mental health services, and in particular, the experiences of Latino populations. Her work focuses on the relationship between gender, citizenship, and need and use of mental health services as well as the burden of mental health issues for Latinos and the uninsured. Victoria Ojeda’s work also examines how citizenship and other factors shape immigrants’ access to health insurance. Prior to coming to Harvard, Victoria was affiliated with the UCLA School of Public Health and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research; there she co-authored numerous policy reports and briefs on access to health services and health insurance coverage for underrepresented and disadvantaged populations, including immigrants, children, low-income adults, and women. Victoria Ojeda received her B.A. in Psychology and Spanish from Brandeis University and her M.P.H. and Ph.D. from the UCLA School of Public Health.

Rafael Ramirez, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Psychology and the Medical School at the University of Puerto Rico. He is a quantitative psychologist with experience in analyses of complete data sets, and has been working as a senior data analyst and statistician at the Behavioral Sciences Research Institute (BSRI) and for the Training Program at the University Center for Psychological Services Research (CUSEP) for the past six years. At present, Dr. Ramirez is a mentor for the Training Core of the EXPORT grant of the Carlos Albizu University of Puerto Rico. He supervises several doctoral students at CUSEP, and teaches statistical analyses and methods for writing empirical papers to junior faculty at BSRI. He received his B.S. degree from the University of Notre Dame and his Ph.D. from the University of New York at Stonybrook (SUNY).

José Rodríguez-Santana, M.D., is Co-Principal Investigator of the Rhode Island-Puerto Rico Asthma Center (RIPRAC) and director and founder of the Asthma Coalition. He is also board certified in pediatric pulmonology and pediatric critical care. Dr. Rodríguez-Santana has been a reviewer for the American Thoracic Society (1999, San Diego, CA) and the Colloquium in Pediatric Critical Care (1999, Chicago, IL) and is currently the Principal Investigator of an EPA project designed to examine the impact of a Comprehensive Asthma Educational Program on indoor allergens and the avoidance of the increase in the knowledge about asthma and indoor pollution in asthmatic children in Puerto Rico. Under his leadership, the University of Puerto Rico Pediatric Pulmonology Program provided service, training and research in the field of respiratory diseases in children in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Dr. Rodríguez-Santana obtained his BS degree from the University of Puerto Rico and his M.D. from the Pedro Enriquez Ureña University.

Norma C. Ware, Ph.D., is a medical anthropologist who conducts qualitative research on mental health services and HIV treatment. Externally funded projects include: (a) development and cultural evaluation of a measure of continuity of care, based on an ethnographic study; (b) study of social influences on adherence to HAART for HIV+, illegal drug users; (c) study of social integration following psychiatric disability. Dr. Ware also trains researchers in the application of qualitative methods to health services research.