Opening Keynote

Katharine Rendle, PhD -- University of Pennsylvania

Katharine A. Rendle is an Associate Professor of Family Medicine and Community Health and of Epidemiology in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and Director of the Penn Center for Cancer Care Innovation (PC3I) at Abramson Cancer Center. Dr. Rendle leads a robust research program that integrates diverse quantitative and qualitative methods to improve the equity, effectiveness, and implementation of high-quality cancer screening and care. She currently leads several large pragmatic trials funded by the NCI focused on increasing lung cancer screening and improving access to cervical cancer treatment globally. Dr. Rendle earned her PhD in Anthropology and Social Work from the University of Michigan. She also earned her MPH in Epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley, and completed her postdoctoral training at the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Prevention Fellowship.

Closing Keynote

Eric Hekler, PhD -- University of California, San Diego

Eric Hekler is a transdisciplinary psychologist and methodologist whose work is organized around a simple but challenging premise: people are different, context matters, and things change. He holds this conviction in both directions at once: developing frameworks and principles that advance how health science is done, while remaining genuinely embedded in the specific people, communities, and places those methods are meant to serve. Drawing on health psychology, public health, systems science, and design, his research has expanded across five interconnected domains — personal health, community health, ecosystem health, the health of research systems themselves, and cultural health — each growing naturally towards a more holistic understanding of health. He is recognized internationally as an expert in digital health and applied health science methods, and is a Professor at UC San Diego's Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science and UC San Diego's Design Lab.

Juliana G. Barnard, MA

As a qualitative and mixed methods research methodologist, over the last 18 years I have served as a co-Investigator, educator, and mentor for clinician scientists and trainees in qualitative and mixed methods study designs and analyses. I am dedicated to conducting rigorous qualitative and mixed methods studies and supporting the development of learners’ research projects and skills in qualitative and mixed methods research. I have provided expertise in qualitative and mixed methods design for more than 60 grants and research studies in ACCORDS and at the Eastern Colorado VA. Finally, I have created & directed education videos on mixed methods health services research (see here for more information: https://medschool.cuanschutz.edu/accords/cores-and-programs/QualitativeMixedMethodResearchCore#AskProfVideo)

Jerica M. Berge, PhD, MPH, LMFT, CFLE*

Jerica M. Berge is the new ACCORDS director, Associate Director for Child Outcomes Research, and a visiting Professor in the Department of Fa e department of family medicine and community health at the University of Minnesota where she also held the Carol Bland Endowed Chair in Research and was a Distingusihed Mcknight Professor.
Dr. Berge is both a researcher and licensed behavioral medicine clinician. Her NIH research agenda focuses broadly on child and family whole person health promotion across the life course using mixed-methods and dissemination science. Dr. Berge has expertise in conducting mixed-methods cohort and intervention studies that utilize ecological momentary assessment (EMA), mHealth, video-recorded family tasks, survey research, qualitative interviews, community-based participatory research, and machine learning to more fully understand complex processes related to health and well-being. Dr. Berge is one of the most cited authors on child and family health from an integrative perspective with over 200 publications, 500 presentations and 35 book chapters on related topics. She has been continuously funded by NIH as a Principal Investigator throughout her career, and currently is the PI on three R01 studies and a R61/33 clinical trial. She is highly committed to elevating the next generation of scholars and has been the PI and core faculty for multiple training grants including the Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH) K12 and the Research on Eating and Activity for Community Health (REACH) T32. In addition, she is a strong advocate for elevating the research careers of faculty of color and currently has 8 diversity supplements connected to her NIH grants. Her leadership experience has included being the director of several centers and labs including being the co-director of the Community and Collaborations core in the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, the director of the Center for Women’s Health Research, the director of the Primary Care Service Line Practice-Based Research Network, the director of the Learning Health Systems Hub, and the director of the Healthy Eating and Activity Across the Lifespan (HEAL) lab, which all focus on dissemination and implementation science.

Sarah Brewer, PhD, MPA*

Dr. Brewer co-directs the Training, Education and Mentorship (TEaM) Core at ACCORDS where she leads the Education Program. She also serves as a Qualitative and Mixed Methodologist in the ACCORDS Qualitative and Mixed Methods Research Core, Assistant Professor of Family Medicine in the School of Medicine, and  Associate Director for the Colorado Children’s Outcomes Network, a state-wide practice based research network (PBRN) of pediatric practices in Colorado focused on answering clinically relevant research questions. Dr. Brewer's research interests include preventive health behavior interventions, implementation of interventions in healthcare settings, patient and stakeholder engagement, and health communication. She specific focuses on community-engaged research that addresses health disparities and informs structural and systems-level changes to improve health and empower underserved and disenfranchised communities. She earned a PhD in Health and Behavioral Sciences from the University of Colorado Denver, a graduate certificate in Public Health Sciences from the Colorado School of Public Health, a Master of Public Administration with a focus in health policy from University of Colorado Denver, and. B.A. in International Studies and German Languages and Literature from the University of Denver.

Elena Broaddus, PhD, MSPH

Elena is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and a methodologist in the ACCORDS Qualitative and Mixed Methods Core. She holds a PhD in Public Health and has trained in Dissemination & Implementation Science (D&I) via the ACCORDS D&I certificate program and completed a 3-year primary care research fellowship. Her interests include innovative mixed methods analysis approaches like Qualitative Comparative Analysis and Coincidence Analysis as well as pragmatic approaches like AI-supported rapid qualitative analysis.

Tyler Bucker, MD, MSc

Tyler Buckner, MD, MSc, is the Director of the University of Colorado Hemophilia and Thrombosis Center. Tyler grew up in Tennessee and attended Rhodes College in Memphis. He completed medical school, Internal Medicine/Pediatrics residency, and combined Adult and Pediatric Hematology fellowship at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Dr. Buckner is a former member of the National Bleeding Disorders Foundation Medical and Scientific Advisory Council (MASAC). Dr. Buckner’s research focuses on pain assessment and management in people with bleeding disorders.

Liza M. Creel, PhD, MPH*

Dr. Creel Creel is an Associate Professor in the Division of Health Care Policy and Research at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus School of Medicine. She is also a member of the Economic Analysis Core within ACCORDS and Affiliate Faculty in the Farley Health Policy Center. Dr. Creel's research is in the areas of maternal and child health, organizational collaboration within the healthcare and social service systems, and policy evaluation as it relates to impacts on cost, quality, and access. Dr. Creel serves as PI and Co-I on several studies, including a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation supported grant to examine cross-sector alignment among organizations serving pregnant and parenting women in recovery. Dr. Creel has taught courses in health policy analysis, health policy research, and microeconomic theory. She received her PhD in Health Services Research from Texas A&M University School of Public Health and her MPH from the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

Catherine Derington, PharmD, MS

Katie Derington, PharmD, MS, is an Assistant Professor of Cardiology at the University of Colorado and co-director of the Colorado Cardiovascular Outcomes Research group. She leads a research program focused on improving hypertension treatment and cardiometabolic outcomes using real-world evidence and innovative medication-optimization strategies. Her work bridges academic, clinical, and VA systems to inform scalable, patient-centered cardiovascular prevention.

Heather Gilmartin, PhD, NP

Heather Gilmartin, PhD, NP is a Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Colorado, School of Public Health - Department of Health Systems, Management, and Policy and an Associate Director of the Dissemination and Implementation Research Core at the Colorado Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. Dr. Gilmartin’s research focuses on optimizing healthcare culture to enhance workforce stability as well as patient health, safety, and wellbeing.

Russell E. Glasgow, PhD*

Dr. Glasgow is Director of the Dissemination and Implementation Program of ACCORDS and research professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Prior to Fall 2013, he was Deputy Director for Implementation Science in the Division of Cancer Control and Population Science at the U. S. National Cancer Institute (http://cancercontrol.cancer.gov/IS/). Dr. Glasgow is an implementation scientist and evaluation expert who has worked on many transdisciplinary research issues including chronic illness self-management, worksite health promotion, primary care-based interventions, and community-based prevention programs involving community health centers.

Jodi Summers Holtrop, PhD

Jodi Summers Holtrop, PhD is a Professor and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Family and a Co-Director of the Dissemination and Implementation Science Program at the Adult and Child Consortium for Health Outcomes Research and Delivery Science (ACCORDS) at the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine. Dr. Holtrop has extensive experience as an implementation scientist, qualitative and mixed methods researcher, health educator and primary care research director. Dr. Holtrop has participated in primary care research for over 29 years; this includes serving as a Principal Investigator on NIH, AHRQ, PCORI and foundation grants. Her personal research is focused on implementation of evidence-based intervention to prevent and manage chronic disease in primary care.

Monica Perez Jolles, PhD, MA

Mónica Pérez Jolles, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and faculty at ACCORDS’ Dissemination & Implementation Science Core Program. She draws from complex systems and implementation science methods and frameworks to align interventions to local contexts, and from collaborative engagement approaches such as implementation and process service mapping, prioritization exercises, and Co-creation workshops. Dr. Perez Jolles currently leads a PCORI-funded Science of Engagement project validating a bilingual in Spanish measure of co-creation in partner research engagement.

Bethany Kwan, PhD, MSPH, FSBM*

Bethany Kwan, PhD, MSPH, FSBM is a Professor and Associate Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, Anschutz Medical Campus. She is a health services researcher and dissemination and implementation (D&I) scientist with the Adult & Child Center for Outcomes Research and Delivery Science (ACCORDS). She is the Director of the D&I research core and co-lead for the Pragmatic EHR-Embedded Trials (PEET) program for the Colorado Clinical & Translational Sciences Institute. Her research uses community engagement, designing for dissemination, and pragmatic trial methods to investigate strategies to improve health and health care delivery.

Allison L'Hotta, PhD, OTD

Dr. L’Hotta’s research aims to improve access to rehabilitation services for children with cancer across the continuum of care. She uses community-engaged approaches to better understand how we can enhance cancer care delivery by centering the perspectives of children and families with lived experience. Her work focuses on identifying common cancer symptoms using patient-reported outcome measures and developing strategies to triage children to evidence-based interventions that reduce cancer-related morbidity and improve quality of life. In addition to her research, she provides clinical care as an occupational therapist in the Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders at Children’s Hospital Colorado.

Sarah Leslie, MPH

Sarah E. Leslie specializes in patient-centered outcomes research, sexual wellbeing, and cancer survivorship. She works within the PACTT Lab and the Colorado Program for Patient-Centered Decisions, where she leads multi-site breast cancer research and evaluation initiatives focused on quality-of-life integrated decision aids, longitudinal patient-reported outcomes (PROs), UX-informed data visualization, and sexual health education in cancer survivorship. Prior to joining ACCORDS, Sarah spent more than a decade in public health and health systems research including leadership roles in survey methodology, mixed-methods behavioral health interventions, mHealth program development, and systems-level evaluation for safety-net institutions and state agencies.

Hillary Lum, MD, PhD

Hillary Lum is a geriatrician and palliative medicine physician researcher. Her research focuses on developing and implementing real-world interventions to improve care for older adults with serious illnesses and their family caregivers. She enjoys mentorship and capacity building for health services researchers, including through her role as Director of the Training, Education and Mentorship Core at ACCORDS.

Ajay Major, MD, MBA

Dr. Major is an assistant professor of medicine and malignant hematologist specializing in the treatment of lymphomas, with particular interest in indolent non-Hodgkin lymphomas, CLL/SLL, and Waldenstrom macroglobulinemia. He is a patient-reported outcomes (PRO) methodologist and his outcomes and health services research is focused on using PROs to measure health-related quality of life, treatment tolerability, and the short- and long-term symptom burden from lymphoma and anti-cancer therapies throughout survivorship.

Dan Matlock, MD, MPH

Dr. Matlock is the Director of the Colorado Program for Patient Centered Decisions at ACCORDS (The Adult and Child Consortium for Outcomes Research and Delivery Science). He is board certified in Internal Medicine, Geriatrics, and Palliative care. His research is aimed at fundamentally changing and improving how patients make decisions around invasive cardiovascular technologies. He has been funded under several NHLBI, NIA, NCI, and PCORI awards studying shared decision making among older adults making decisions around invasive technologies.

James Mitchell, PhD

James Mitchell, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics, part of the Centre for Health AI on the CU Anschutz Medical Campus. James completed his Computer Science PhD in the UK after working for Apple Inc. for almost a decade. His research focuses on HCI, User-centered Design, and software development, predominantly in clinical information delivery and decision support.

Anna Maw, MD, MS

Dr. Maw is an adult hospitalist, implementation scientist and Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Colorado. She is an investigator within both the dissemination and implementation science and the learning health system cores at ACCORDS. Dr. Maw’s research focuses on implementation and pragmatic evaluation of new technology used in clinical settings to promote effective and equitable use.  

Brad Morse, PhD

Dr. Brad Morse earned his Ph.D. in Technology, Media, and Society from the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder, following a Master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology. His research focuses on user-centered design, user experience (UX), human-centered design, mHealth, rapid qualitative research design and methods, community engagement, and collaborative product design. Skateboarding long distances is how Brad finds balance between trips to the mountains to snowboard.

Suchitra Rao, MBS, MSCS

Suchitra Rao is Associate Professor of Pediatrics in the Sections of Infectious Diseases and Hospital Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. She is a successful federally funded investigator, with current grant funding from NHLBI, AHRQ, PCORI and CDC. Her expertise is in respiratory pathogens in children, with over 140 publications evaluating the epidemiology of influenza, RSV, SARS-CoV-2, vaccination effectiveness, vaccine delivery in different healthcare settings and the host response to vaccines and natural infection.  She has expertise in data science using large EHR networks. She is the site PI and Steering Committee chair of PEDSnet, which is a multi-center learning health systems network of pediatric institutions in the US.

Elizabeth Ruzicka, PhD

Elizabeth (Libby) Ruzicka, PhD, LP is a Program Manager at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. She is also the Project Director for the Family Matters research program in the Healthy Eating and Activity across the Lifespan (HEAL) Lab. Her primary research interests include the intergenerational transmission of eating behaviors and the impact of various socio-ecological factors including socioeconomic status and trauma/stress.

Sarah Schmidt, MD, MSHI

Dr. Sarah Schmidt is a pediatric emergency medicine physician and senior informaticist at Children’s Hospital Colorado, where she also serves as the Medical Director of Clinical Research Informatics for the Colorado Child Health Research Institute. She has partnered extensively with researchers, applying her informatics expertise to advance studies in STI testing, antibiotic stewardship, clinical decision support, and discharge education. Nationally, Dr. Schmidt chairs the Epic ASAP Steering Board for Pediatric Emergency Medicine, contributing her clinical and informatics leadership to the development of foundational tools that strengthen pediatric emergency care.

Halden Scott, MD, MSCS

Halden Scott is a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and is a pediatric emergency physician and Director of Research in Pediatric Emergency Medicine at Children’s Hospital Colorado. Dr. Scott’s research focuses on improving diagnosis, resuscitation, and systems of emergency care in pediatric sepsis through clinical research, implementation science, informatics and predictive modeling. She has shaped clinical sepsis care as a member of the Surviving Sepsis Campaign, the International Pediatric Sepsis Definition Taskforce, and the Improving Pediatric Sepsis Outcomes collaborative. Her research has recently focused on sepsis in children in general emergency settings outside of specialized children’s hospitals, which is where most children receive their first hours of emergency care.

Jiayuan Shi, MS

Jiayuan Shi is a Ph.D. candidate in Biostatistics at the Colorado School of Public Health, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Her research focuses on advanced statistical methodology, including joint modeling of longitudinal change points and recurrent events, with applications in cystic fibrosis and aging research. She previously served as a Senior Biostatistician at Sanofi Pasteur and held roles at Bristol-Myers Squibb and Novartis, leading statistical design and analysis for Phase I–III clinical trials. Her work spans clinical trial methodology, survival analysis, biomarker research, and regulatory submissions, with publications in leading medical and statistical journals.

Justin Shrader, BA

Justin Shrader is a Health Communication Specialist and Program Coordinator at the Colorado Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CCTSI) and the Adult and Child Center for Outcomes Research & Delivery Science (ACCORDS). With over five years of experience in Dissemination Practice, he has been published in Frontiers In Public Health and worked as an undergrad student for mAb Colorado, a campaign that helped raise awareness of a monoclonal antibody treatment for COVID-19. Justin enjoys working with researchers and their teams to create easy-to-understand visual tools that improve patient health outcomes and share innovative research findings.  He currently lives in Denver, Colorado, and outside of work, is an amateur astronomer who enjoys sharing the beauty of the stars with his friends and family.

Heather Smyth, PhD

Dr. Smyth is a Research Associate with the Center for Innovative Design and Analysis (CIDA) at the Colorado School of Public Health. As a collaborative team scientist, she provides biostatistical support for various research projects within ACCORDS, CU College of Nursing, and the Rocky Mountain Prevention Research Center. Trained as a Quantitative Psychologist, her methodological expertise includes mediation & moderation, causal inference, psychometrics, and latent variable modeling.

Talia Thompson, PhD

Talia Thompson is a licensed psychologist and an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Professional Psychology at the University of Denver. Her research centers on promoting the wellbeing and quality of life of children with complex medical conditions and their families. She employs community-engaged, qualitative, and strengths-based methodologies to produce research that reflects and responds to the priorities, needs, and lived experiences of the communities she partners with.

Caroline Tietbohl, PhD, MA

Dr. Tietbohl is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and a qualitative methodologist in the ACCORDS Qualitative and Mixed Methods Core. She is a sociologist with expertise in qualitative methods and serves as a co-investigator across numerous studies aiming to improve health care delivery across a variety of clinical contexts. A primary focus of her research is using qualitative methods and methodologies to better understand health care experiences and to inform potential changes or interventions, with a particular interest in how communication shapes health care experiences and decision-making.

Katy Trinkley, PharmD, PhD

Katy Trinkley is an Associate Professor and implementation scientist at the University of Colorado in the Department of Family Medicine. She is also a clinical informaticist and Director for the ACCORDS Learning Health Systems Core. Dr. Trinkley’s research focuses on advancing the visionary goals of learning health systems and leveraging data and implementation science to create innovative health information technologies to optimize safe, effective, and equitable medication use. Much of her research focuses on clinical decision support tools within the electronic health record and identifying ways to improve accessibility of the PRISM implementation science framework through integration with other methods and approaches such as user-centered design and artificial intelligence.

Bryan Wallace, MPH

Drawing from multi-disciplinary theoretical and methodological perspectives, my current research focuses on shared decision making in cardiovascular health. I work on the development and testing of decision aids in diverse fields. My previous research included complex care in pediatrics, holistic health for migraines in teenagers, and smoking cessation in teenagers. I am currently working on my PhD in the interdisciplinary field of Health Behavioral Sciences.

Yaxu Zhuang, PhD

Yaxu Zhuang, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Healthcare Policy and Research at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, specializing in biostatistics, data science, and AI to enhance healthcare outcomes. His work includes contributions through NIH-funded projects and publications, and he's actively involved in different collaborative projects focused on data analysis, data management and methodology development. I am dedicated to advancing health services research by developing novel statistical methodologies.