ThinkResearch Podcast

Mark Kennedy, MBA, is a senior program manager in the Chronic Disease Prevention and Control Division at the Boston Public Health Commission. In this role, Kennedy is leading the creation and implementation of the cancer early detection plan for the City of Boston. He is also faculty for “Shared Decision-Making: Essential Skills for Prostate, Lung and Breast Cancer Screening,” an online continuing medical education course at the Massachusetts Medical Society, and teaches graduate and undergraduate courses at Regis College and Emerson College.

Additionally, he is the Boston Region Leader for the Massachusetts Comprehensive Cancer Coalition (MCCC) for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and is co-chair for the Boston Medical Center Oncology Accelerator Advisory Council. Previously, Kennedy spent 13 years at Dana-Farber. He received his executive MBA from Northeastern University.

Rosa Alemán, BA, is a digital communications and content strategist at American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Massachusetts. She helps engage upwards of 70,000 ACLUM community members across social media platforms, with timely, relevant, and valuable content designed to educate and inspire meaningful action.

In 2015, Alemán designed a higher learning project titled #MyDiyMFA: A three-year self-directed education experience consisting of a year of reading, a year of writing, and a year of making.  The DIY MFA project aims to empower people to learn powerful communication technology skills that amplify voice and perspective while encouraging the exploration of pathways and practices for proactively confronting systemic oppression, white supremacy, colonialist ideologies and institutional racism across societal sectors.

Jhordan Wynne, MPH, is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Wynne’s research interests encompass early food environments, breastfeeding, and the onset of preventable chronic diseases. She is also interested in intergenerational approaches to chronic disease prevention. Her work focuses on Black and Afro-Latin populations in the Americas, and other under-researched minority populations. Wynne obtained her BA degrees in Spanish and global environment and health, as well as her MPH in health behavior & health education from the University of Michigan, where her research centered on psychosocial factors associated with decisions to breastfeed.

In this third segment of 2022 episode highlights, researchers discuss health equity, neurotechnology to treat brain disorders, and mental health considerations for biomedical trainees and students.

In this second podcast highlighting segments of the past year, researchers discuss utilizing health and economic data to generate interesting questions, assessing penicillin allergies, tackling healthcare costs in America, the importance of mentorship, and educating homeless youth in LA about HIV prevention.

In the first episode of our series highlighting previous podcasts, we return to insightful conversations with researchers who have taken unconventional paths to form their academic and research careers. This episode first episde of the retrospective series features Dr. Charles Deutsch, Dr. Alex Lin, Dr. Corrie Painter, and Dr. Raj Gupta.

Teresa Evans, PhD, is a scientist, leader, and consultant whose passion involves cultivating innovation and performance within commercial and government teams. Currently, Evans is a principal consultant for TiER1 Performance, an employee-owned consulting firm that activates business strategies through people. In this role, she leads projects that help organizations engage their staff, creating high-performing teams and places to work. Evans additionally serves as faculty member at the University of Texas (UT) Health San Antonio, and is founding director of their Office of Career Development. A former partner in a technology accelerator and COO of a clinical research, Evans has commercialization expertise that spans both bioscience and technology. She received her PhD in neuroscience from UT Health San Antonio.

Caterina Stamoulis, PhD, is associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Her broad research interests are computational neuroscience, signal processing, neurostatistics, and data science. She leads multiple projects that use large-scale datasets and novel computational tools to elucidate the evolving neural circuitry of the developing brain. Stamoulis completed her undergraduate and graduate studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She completed her postdoctoral training in neuroscience at MIT and in biostatistics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Zoë Ayres, PhD, is an analytical scientist. After spending several years in academia post-PhD, she is now head of research and development in industry. Ayres is a mental health advocate in her spare time, working towards improving mental health in research settings, primarily focusing on graduate mental health. She works to raise awareness of issues commonly faced by academics through various campaigns and initiatives and is the author of the #mentalhealth poster series on Twitter (you can find her @zjayres). She is author of the book “Managing Your Mental Health During Your PhD: A Survival Guide” published by Springer Nature in 2022.

Juanita Limas, PhD, is an advisor/research scientist in Molecular Pharmacology (DCRT) at Eli Lilly & Company in Indianapolis, IN. Previously, Limas served in the Peace Corps as a community health education volunteer in Nicaragua, where she provided logistical support to the Ministry of Health. Following the suicides of several friends during her PhD, Limas was spurred to start a dialogue with both Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), as well as the Department of Pharmacology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-Chapel Hill) surrounding mental health challenges of PhD students in STEM. These conversations led to systemic changes in the HHMI Gilliam Fellowship application process, requiring applicants to understand what types of mental health resources are available at their own institutions as well as requiring students/PIs to address this in their applications. In addition, Limas started a mental health task force within her department, collecting data and starting initiatives surrounding ways to better support graduate students in the department. At the end of her PhD, she collaborated with Zoë Ayres to write a paper about research culture’s impact on mental health. Limas completed her PhD in pharmacology at the UNC-Chapel Hill and her master’s degree in biomedical sciences from Barry University.