Injury Prevention Center Trainees
2020 Injury Prevention Center Summer Interns
The University of Michigan Injury Prevention Center is excited to report that seven students interns joined us as 2020 summer interns. These students had the opportunity to gain mentored research and practice-based experience in the area of injury prevention that is of interest to them.
The seven students that received funding for summer 2020 are listed below.
Areli Ariana Balderrama
MPH Candidate 2022, Health Behavior & Health Education, U-M School of Public Health; MURP Candidate, 2022; U-M Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning
Mentor: Dr. Sarah Stoddard
Injury Prevention Focus Area: Substance Abuse
Mx. Balderrama’s Summer Project: Assist with research on a summer program for at-promise youth and the impact of COVID-19 on a Peer Recovery Coach (PRC) program.
Ferhana Begum
Masters of Public Health (MPH) in Epidemiology, 2021, University of Michigan School of Public Health
Mentor: Dr. Lisa Wexler
Injury Prevention Focus Area: Suicide Prevention
Ms. Begum’s Summer Project: Work on suicide prevention by means of safe firearm storage among indigenous and native peoples in rural and remote Alaska.
Miranda Gali
MPH & MSW Dual Degree Candidate, Health Behavior & Health Education, U-M School of Public Health, U-M School of Social Work
Mentor: Dr. Patrick Carter & Dr. Gina Dahlem
Injury Prevention Focus Area: Violence Prevention, Opioid Overdose Prevention
Ms. Gali’s Summer Project: Work on Project IntERact (Dr. Carter), which aims to implement health coaching and smartphone app technology to help promote gun safety and mitigate violence among 16-24 year-olds in Flint, MI. Also work on Project A.C.T.I.O.N (Dr. Dahlem), which is a tool used to help educate community laypersons, first responders, and more on naloxone and opioid overdose reversal.
Eskira Kahsay
MPH Candidate 2021, Epidemiology, U-M School of Public Health
Mentor: Laura Thomas, LMSW, MPH, CCRP
Injury Prevention Focus Area: Opioid Overdose
Ms. Kahsay’s Summer Project: Work on the Prescription Opioid Wellness and Engagement Research in the Emergency Department (PowerED) study led by Dr. Amy Bohnert, a randomized control trial on the efficacy of an adaptive mobile health intervention to reduce non-medical opioid use following emergency room discharge.
Valerie Micol
MPH, MS, PhD Candidate, 2022, Clinical Science, U of M Department of Psychology
Mentor: Dr. Ewa Czyz
Injury Prevention Focus Area: Youth Suicide Prevention
Ms. Micol’s Summer Project: Development of Motivational Interviewing-enhanced text-based support for parents of teens who have visited the emergency department for suicidal ideation or attempt.
Dalia Saif
MPH & MPP Dual Degree Candidate 2022, Health Behavior & Health Education (U-M School of Public Health) and International Policy (U-M Ford School of Public Policy)
Mentor: Susan Franzen, MS & Dr.Justin Heinze
Injury Prevention Focus Area: ACEs & Suicide Prevention
Ms. Saif’s Summer Project: Work on the Flint Youth Injury Study-3, which aims to understand how the intergenerational transmission of substance use is affected by Cannabis legalization. Assist with literature reviews, codebooks, online surveys, conducting and analyzing interviews.
Keara Sullivan
Master of Public Health, 2021, School of Public Health
Mentor: Dr. Jason Goldstick
Injury Prevention Focus Area: Opioid Overdose
Ms. Sullivan’s Summer Project: Work with the System for Opioid Overdose Surveillance (SOS), a system providing near real-time overdose data to community stakeholders to assist in their timely response and tracking of potential overdose hot spots.
2019 Injury Prevention Center Summer Interns
The University of Michigan Injury Prevention Center is excited to report that eight students interns joined us as 2019 summer interns, with 6 working in Michigan-based projects and 2 working in Atlanta on-site at the CDC. These students had the opportunity to gain mentored research and practice-based experience in the area of injury prevention that is of interest to them.
The eight students that received funding for summer 2019 are listed below.
Charlotte Burnett
MPH & MSW Dual Degree Candidate 2020, Health Behavior & Health Education, U-M School of Public Health and U-M School of Social Work
Mentor: Laura Thomas, MPH
Injury Prevention Focus Area: Opioid Overdose
Ms. Burnett’s Work: Work on the Opt-In Project, that aims to test an opioid intervention with the distribution of naloxone. Assist with recruitment, conducting quantitative and qualitative research methods with participants and site staff, tracking data, and evaluating the program to measure for impact.
Christine Callahan
MS 2019, Movement Science, U-M School of Kinesiology
Mentor: Dr. Steven Broglio
Injury Prevention Focus Area: Concussion
Ms. Callahan’s Work: Assist with research on assessment diagnoses, long-term effects, and treatment of sport-related concussion.
Janie Felton
MPH Candidate 2020, Health Behavior & Health Education, U-M School of Public Health
Mentor: Dr. Quyen Ngo
Injury Prevention Focus Area: Youth Violence
Ms. Felton’s Work: Lead a qualitative study about hope, mindfulness, and gainful activity among people who report partner and non-partner violence. Also, recruitment for the Mind and Voice Project in Flint, and help with other studies about sexual violence, intimate partner violence, and firearm injury.
Ashley Rapp
MPH Candidate 2020, Epidemiology, U-M School of Public Health
Mentor: Dr. Christopher Harper
Injury Prevention Focus Area: Violence
Ms. Rapp’s Work: Onsite at the National Injury Prevention Center at the CDC, to help conduct a discourse analysis of media narratives regarding violence against transgender women.
Jane Smith
MPH Candidate 2020, Health Behavior and Health Education, U-M School of Public Health, Certificate in Injury Science
Mentor: Jenna Kirschenman
Injury Prevention Focus Area: Multiple
Ms. Smith’s Summer Project: Onsite at CDC to assist in setting up a grant program, identifying grantee needs, providing technical assistance, doing strategic planning for coalition activities, and helping prepare manuscripts.
Pnina Tranen
MPH Candidate 2020, Health Behavior and Health Education, U-M School of Public Health; and MSW Candidate 2020, Interpersonal Practice Mental Health, U-M School of Social Work
Mentor: Dr. Justin Heinze
Injury Prevention Focus Area: Opioid Overdose and Youth Violence
Ms. Tranen’s Summer Project: Work on program evaluation of community partners, including evaluation of an opioid overdose prevention program. I will also be working on projects through Michigan’s Core State Violence and Injury prevention Program and activities may include assisting in grant writing and creation of materials for community partners.
Meghna Tummala
Joint BS MD student – BS 2021, Public Health, School of Public Health; MD 2025, School of Medicine, Brown University
Mentor: Dr. Jason Goldstick
Injury Prevention Focus Area: Opioid Overdose
Ms. Tummala’s Summer Project: Work on the System for Opioid Overdose Surveillance (S.O.S) Project, collaborating with EMS, Emergency Departments, and Medical Examiner offices to collect data on nonfatal and fatal opioid overdoses across the state of Michigan. Worked on visualization and heat maps for the data collected. This project will result in a functional model system that can be implemented nationwide.
Cate Vreede
MPH Candidate 2020, Health Behavior and Health Education, U-M School of Public Health
Mentor: Dr. Jason Goldstick
Injury Prevention Focus Area: Opioid Overdose
Ms. Vreede’s Summer Project: Work with Dr. Goldstick and the Washtenaw County Health Department on the SOS Washtenaw County Project, which utilizes SOS data to create real-time hot spot maps of opioid overdoses. The project team works with community stakeholders to determine how they can best utilize the SOS data to adjust their service delivery for people with opioid use disorders. Ms. Vreede assisted in the collection and analysis of qualitative interviews and focus groups with community stakeholders to inform the development of a toolkit on how community stakeholders can create a coordinated response to opioid overdoses based on the SOS data.
2018 Injury Prevention Center Summer Interns
The University of Michigan Injury Prevention Center is excited to report that five student interns worked as 2018 summer interns. These students had the opportunity to gain mentored research and practice-based experience in the area of injury prevention that is of interest to them.
Below are the five students that received funding for summer 2018.
Brianne Brenneman, BA
MPH Candidate 2019, Health Behavior & Health Education, U-M School of Public Health
Mentor: Erin Bonar, PhD (U-M Psychiatry)
Injury Prevention Focus Area: Sexual Violence
Ms. Brenneman’s main focus was a project where college students were asked what they want in a sexual violence prevention program. Another project she worked on was hot-spot mapping where she mapped areas in Ann Arbor that students had heard about sexual assaults happening or areas they thought were risky.
Laura Hollander, BA
MPH Candidate 2019, Health Behavior & Health Education, U-M School of Public Health
Mentor: Sarah Stoddard (U-M School of Nursing)
Injury Prevention Focus Area: Youth Violence, Substance abuse
Ms. Hollander worked with Dr. Sarah Stoddard on the Youth Empowerment Solutions for Positive Futures (YES-PF) Program. She assisted Dr. Stoddard with authoring a curriculum to increase the empowerment and future orientations of middle school students identified for being at risk for school dropout and drug use. Along with developing curricula, she planned and implemented orientation sessions for the teachers selected for this school-based intervention, and helped Dr. Stoddard gather baseline data from student participants.
Lauren Leslie, BA
MPH Candidate 2019, Health Behavior & Health Education, U-M School of Public Health
Mentor: Dr. Ashley D’Inverno (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Division of Violence Prevention, Surveillance Branch)
Injury Prevention Focus Area: Intimate Partner Violence and Sexual Violence
Ms. Leslie assisted in developing a syndromic definition for intimate partner violence (IPV) and sexual violence (SV) by reviewing chief complaint data from IPV/SV emergency department visits from the CDC’s Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE). Additionally, literature and other data sources were reviewed to identify ICD-10-CM codes that are used for IPV/SV medical visits. Syndromic surveillance provides trends of IPV/SV which be tracked over time and overlaid with social health determinants to inform best practice prevention and control efforts. Additionally, she supported the development of a paper examining the link between a state-level gender inequality index and state rates of sexual violence and intimate partner violence.
Amanda Mauri, MPH
PhD Student, Health Services Organization and policy; AHRQ Pre-Doctoral Fellow, U-M School of Public Health
Mentor: Rebecca Haffajee (U-M School of Public Health)
Injury Prevention Focus Area: Opioid Overdose
Ms. Mauri worked on multiple projects related to policy approaches to address opioid misuse and firearm violence. Along with her collaborators Dr. Rebecca Haffajee and Ms. Tarlise Townsend, she completed a scoping review of quantitative evaluations of state opioid misuse prevention policies. Dr. Haffajee and Ms. Mauri are also co-authoring a project that maps state-level adoption of opioid laws overtime. Ms. Mauri also participated in the FACTS policy workgroup and looks forward to continuing her involvement in the task force.
Tarlise Townsend, MPP
Joint PhD Student, Health Services Organization and Policy (U-M School of Public Health) & Sociology (U-M LSA)
Mentor: Rebecca Haffajee (U-M SPH)
Injury Prevention Focus Area: Opioid Overdose
National efforts to reduce prescription opioid dependence and misuse, an important element of the current opioid epidemic, have included the 2010 reformulation of OxyContin into an abuse-deterrent form and the 2016 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain, among others. Research has shown that OxyContin reformulation contributed to declines in OxyContin prescribing, and initial evidence suggests that the 2016 guidelines accelerated the ongoing decline in opioid prescribing for chronic pain. However, it is unclear whether these reductions have targeted the patients at greatest risk of misuse, addiction, and/or overdose, while preserving appropriate pain management for patients who need it. The study examines whether prescribing changes attributed to these two interventions varied by race/ethnicity and, if so, how this influenced racial/ethnic disparities in opioid prescribing. With Dr. Haffajee’s mentorship, Ms. Townsend spent the summer conceptualizing the study idea, design, and statistical analyses, conducting a literature review, learning SAS, and learning to work with medical claims data.