University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

Meet the Fellows

Fellows
Elena Broaddus, Ph.D., MSPH, is a western-Colorado based Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and a methodologist in the qualitative and mixed-methods core in the Adult and Child Center for Outcomes Research and Delivery Science (ACCORDS) at the University of Colorado. She is also Associate Director for Research and Engagement for the Partners Engaged in Achieving Changes in Health network (PEACHnet), a practice- and community-based research network for Colorado’s western slope. Elena’s doctoral training was in global public health and social and behavioral interventions, and her current research interests focus on the integration of efforts to improve food security, nutrition, and other basic needs in primary care. Through the ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship, she built expertise in dissemination and implementation science methodologies, with an emphasis on configurational comparative methods and other innovative mixed-methods approaches.
Josh Cockroft, MD is a family physician and psychiatrist with an interest in health services/implementation science research and medical education. He grew up in the front range before attending college in the Philadelphia area, medical school at Vanderbilt University, and completed his combined FM/Psychiatry residency at the University of Cincinnati before the start of the ACCORDS Primary Care Fellowship. His research background includes psychometric instrument validation, examining the role of trust in healthcare for women with a history of substance use disorders, implementation evaluation of a remote behavioral health training in a global health setting, and evaluation of novel models in and technology used for behavioral health consultation in an inpatient setting. His longer-term research interest (and interest in the fellowship) is primarily focused on the optimization of primary and preventive care delivery for individuals with severe mental illness.
Emily Dunston, Ph.D. completed her doctoral degree in Health and Kinesiology at the University of Utah with a graduate certificate in Gerontology before beginning the ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship in the summer of 2024. Her doctoral training focused on exercise across the cancer care continuum, particularly among older adults with cancer. Her current research interests are centered around the delivery of physical activity programs for people living with cancer and other chronic diseases in primary care. Through the ACCORDS primary care research fellowship, she aims to gain expertise in dissemination and implementation science methodologies and to explore the integration of physical activity interventions into clinical healthcare settings.
Hannah Friedman, MD is a pediatrician, physician-researcher, and educator committed to caring for individuals with childhood onset medical complexity. She is a pediatrician in the Special Care Clinic at Children's Hospital Colorado, a medical home for children with medical complexity. Her research focuses on health care transition for adolescents and young adults with childhood onset medical complexity. She is dedicated to teaching medical trainees about caring for individuals with childhood onset medical complexity and the health care transition. Through the ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship, she further developed her skills in qualitative and co-design methods to help optimize the health care transition for individuals with childhood onset medical complexity.
J. Kyle Haws, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and accepted an Assistant Professor position in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and the Pediatric Mental Health Institute at the Children’s Hospital Colorado. He completed his doctoral training in Clinical Psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with concentrations in Child/Family and Quantitative Methodology. As a psychologist, he has provided assessments and treatments to children, adolescents, adults, and their families in myriad communities. Through his clinical experiences, he has become intimately familiar with the current limitations of mental healthcare. He has developed a research program to improve access to evidence-based mental healthcare. By integrating dynamical systems science, dissemination and implementation principles, and community-based participatory approaches, his research projects aim to create sustainable and pragmatic solutions that positively impact the healthcare landscape, promoting a healthier and more connected community.
David Higgins, MD, MPH is a pediatrician and preventive medicine physician. He accepted an Assistant Professor position as a physician-researcher in the Department of General Pediatrics at the University of Colorado after completing this fellowship. His experience as a community pediatrician led him into population health research at the Colorado School of Public Health where he completed a second residency in Public Health and Preventive Medicine. His research focuses on improving vaccine delivery and other pediatric care preventive services in the primary care setting. Through the ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship, he further developed skills in delivery science, community-based participatory research, and pragmatic clinical trials to reduce the burden of vaccine-preventable diseases and to improve the health of children, adolescents, and their communities.
Andrea Jimenez-Zambrano, PhD, MPH is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics and has extensive experience in community-based participatory research. She has also provided support and gained health-related research experience by collaborating with health outcomes and clinical researchers at ACCORDS and the Center for Global Health at the University of Colorado for over 10 years. As a Peruvian immigrant growing up in Colorado, she observed disparities in health outcomes across a variety of communities. This experience inspired her to pursue interdisciplinary training in public health and social science. Her primary research interest is addressing health disparities in primary care through research that enhances the health and well-being of at-risk populations served by Colorado’s safety net health system of Federally Qualified Health Centers, including Spanish-speaking populations.
Michael Mattiucci, MD, MPH is a primary care pediatrician. He accepted an Assistant Professor position as a physician-researcher in the department of Pediatrics at the University of Rochester in New York where he grew up and attended medical school. As an ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellow, he studied interventions to improve health outcomes in clinical and community settings, and to leverage community-engaged research methods to improve primary care delivery. During the fellowship, he conducted a mixed methods evaluation of a social care intervention in a pediatric primary care setting, which included a secondary dataset analysis (using latent class analysis) to characterize subgroups of pediatric populations with social needs, as well as qualitative interviews with caregivers who have used a food insecurity program.