About
Mission and Overview
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Behavioral Health Workforce Research Center (UNC-BHWRC) is a dynamic hub of innovative, data-driven research on the workforce responsible for providing mental health and substance use services. Our mission is to improve the behavioral health and well-being of the U.S by conducting research to strengthen the current and future behavioral health workforce through exploration of the disparities that perpetuate inequities in behavioral health treatment, access, and quality.
The UNC-BHWRC will produce research to inform policies that support the behavioral health workforce and increase access to quality behavioral health services. UNC-BHWRC, housed within the Program on Health Workforce Research and Policy at the Cecil G. Sheps Center at UNC-Chapel Hill, is dedicated to producing timely and policy-relevant projects to address emerging issues and longstanding challenges to the behavioral health workforce. Research projects will explore national data sources to evaluate workforce composition, need, sufficiency, and distribution, and to better understand evolving models of behavioral health service delivery. UNC-BHWRC is supported by funding from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
UNC-BHWRC Leadership
Brianna M. Lombardi, PhD, MSW
Brianna M. Lombardi serves as the UNC-BHWRC Director. Dr. Lombardi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the UNC-CH School of Medicine and holds a secondary appointment as a Research Assistant Professor at UNC-CH School of Social Work. Currently, Dr. Lombardi serves as the Deputy Director of the HRSA-funded Carolina Health Workforce Research Center. She received her MSW from the University of Pittsburgh and her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Lisa de Saxe Zerden, PhD, MSW
Lisa de Saxe Zerden is the Deputy Director of the UNC-BHWRC. Dr. Zerden is a tenured Associate Professor at the UNC-CH School of Social Work. She currently serves as the Social Work Director of Interprofessional Education and Practice. Prior to the BHWRC, Dr. Zerden served as the Senior Associate Dean for MSW Education for nearly seven years. She received her MSW from the University of California at Los Angeles and her PhD in Sociology and Social Work from Boston University.
Team
Maria Gaiser, MPH
Maria Gaiser, MPH, is a Research Associate/Project Manager with the Behavioral Health Workforce Research Center at Sheps. Maria holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Michigan and received her undergraduate degree from UNC-Chapel Hill. Prior to joining the Sheps Center, Maria provided research services to the University of Michigan Behavioral Health Workforce Research Center. Maria holds 11 years of professional experience in the public health and behavioral health fields, with a primary focus on cross-disciplinary training on addressing health disparities created by social, political, and physical factors through mixed-methods research.
Brooke Lombardi, PhD, MSW
Brooke Lombardi, PhD, MSW, is a Research Associate/Project Manager for the UNC-BHWRC and Carolina Health Workforce Research Center. Dr. Lombardi holds both and a PhD in Social Work and a MSW from UNC-Chapel Hill. Dr. Lombardi’s work focusses on the intersection of sexual victimization and the perinatal period (conception to one-year postpartum); screening for post-traumatic stress disorder during the perinatal period; and, promoting clinician competencies in caring for survivors of trauma during the perinatal period.
Erin Fraher, PhD, MPP
Erin P. Fraher is a tenured Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Fraher directs Program on Health Workforce Research and Policy and the Carolina Health Workforce Research Center at the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research. The Center’s mission is to provide the evidence needed to redesign health workforce training, deployment and regulation in a rapidly changing health care system. Her research focuses on interprofessional teams in emerging models of care, developing new methodologies to project how many health workers will be needed under different possible “futures,” and using life course theory to better understand health professionals’ career trajectories. She serves as co-Principal Investigator of both the Rural Residency Program Development Technical Assistance Center and the Teaching Health Center Planning and Development Technical Assistance Center. Dr. Fraher is the former Chair of the Council on Graduate Medical Education (COGME) which is charged with advising the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Congress on workforce trends, training issues, and financing.
Evan Galloway, MPS
Evan Galloway is a Research Associate with the Program on Health Workforce Research and Policy at Sheps. He received his Master of Professional Science in Health Informatics from UNC-CH. He develops web-based interactive visualizations for exploring health workforce data using D3, Svelte, and MySQL. He also organizes and analyzes health workforce data using Stata and PostgreSQL/PostGIS (for geospatial data). Mr. Galloway will use these skills to support UNC-BHWRC to analyze behavioral health workforce data, in particular using data visualization and mapping to understand the composition of the behavioral health workforce in areas of high disadvantage.
Connor Sullivan, PhD
Connor Sullivan, PhD is a Research Associate / Data Analyst for the UNC Sheps Center Program on Health Workforce Research and Policy, providing data management and statistical analysis services for the Health Workforce Division. Connor holds a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Virginia Tech and received his undergraduate degree from UNC Chapel Hill. Prior to joining the Sheps Center, Connor provided research services to the Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development, Cincinnati VA Medical Center: Trauma Recovery Center, Virginia Tech, and the US JFK Special Warfare Center and School. Originally, his research activities began with Dr. Eric Elbogen at UNC Chapel Hill with the Forensic Psychology Program and Clinic.
Donald Pathman, MD, MPH
Donald Pathman, MD MPH is Professor of Family Medicine and Director of the Program on Primary Care Research at the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has previously served as Director of Sheps Center’s Program of Health Care Workforce, Co-Editor of Education for Health, and member of the National Advisory Board of the National Health Service Corps. His three decades of research and evaluation, yielding more than 100 papers published in peer-reviewed journals, have focused on assessing the effectiveness of federal, state and organization programs intended to build and support the clinician workforce of rural and underserved communities. Since 2012 he has been the academic lead of the 34-state Provider Retention & Information System Management (PRISM) Collaborative, which provides states with real-time survey feedback from their clinicians working underserved areas and safety net practices.
Todd Jensen, PhD, MSW
Todd is a Research Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work, the Associate Director for Research in the Collaborative for Implementation Practice, and a Family Research and Engagement Specialist in the Jordan Institute for Families at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Jensen’s scholarship focuses on promoting family well-being in diverse contexts; strengthening family-serving systems; and centering equity in family research, practice, and policy. Specifically, Dr. Jensen’s work attends to families experiencing relationship transitions and shifts in parental structure; family maltreatment prevention among military-connected families; promoting the use of data and evidence in family-serving systems; understanding the role of trusting relationships in optimizing the uptake of effective programs and practices in family-serving systems; advocating for inclusive definitions of family; and centering equity in the theory and methods used to study and support families.
Orrin D. Ware, PhD, MSW, MPH
Orrin D. Ware is an assistant professor at the UNC-CH. He received a Ph.D. and MSW from the University of Maryland and an MPH from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He received postdoctoral training at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit. Dr. Ware has over a decade of interdisciplinary research experience focusing on behavioral health outcomes. His primary research area is examining the treatment of co-occurring substance use and mental health disorders using electronic medical health records, publicly available data, and primary data collection.
Danielle Roubinov, PhD
Dr. Roubinov is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UNC and the director of the Child and Adolescent Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program (CHAAMP). In her program of research, Dr. Roubinov conducts studies to understand how early experiences of stress and trauma shape children’s development and well-being, and the factors that can help promote positive adjustment even in the context of adversity. Her work spans multiple disciplines, exploring the role of risk and protective factors across biological, psychological, and sociocultural domains as they affect children’s trajectories of mental health. As the director of the Child and Adolescent Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program (CHAAMP) in the UNC Department of Psychiatry, Dr. Roubinov leads a basic and translational research to develop and disseminate interventions that prevent and treat mental health problems in youth.
Nate Sowa, PhD, MD
Dr. Sowa is a Clinical Assistant Professor and the Associate Vice Chair for Virtual and Integrated Care in the Department of Psychiatry at the UNC-CH School of Medicine. He received his B.A. from Albion College, and his Ph.D. in Neurobiology and M.D. from University of North Carolina atChapel Hill. His primary clinical and research interests are in the development and implementation of collaborative care models, as well as the use of telepsychiatry to expand access to care.
Helen Newton, PhD, MPH
Helen Newton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her PhD and MPH from the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and received postdoctoral training at the Yale School of Public Health. Dr. Newton’s research uses administrative data – including claims and administrative surveys - to understand how new payment policies impact behavioral health treatment, access, and quality.
Bernice Adjabeng, DMgt, MA, MSW
Bernice Adjabeng is the Program Director for the North Carolina Certified Peer Support Specialist (NCCPSS) Program with the Behavioral Health Springboard at the UNC-CH SSW. She oversees program development, implementation, policy formulation, technical assistance, and staffing and supervision of the program. She holds a Doctor of Management degree from Webster University and master’s degrees in Nonprofit Management and Social Work, both from Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Adjabeng has 15 years of experience in both direct practice and community development, as well as in evaluation, leadership, and management.
Alex Gertner, PhD, MD
Alex Gertner completed a Ph.D. in Health Policy and Management from the Gillings School of Global Public Health in 2020 and will graduate from the UNC School of Medicine in May 2022 with a MD. He received the Outstanding Dissertation Award from AcademyHealth. Upon receiving his MD, he will complete a research-focused residency in child and adolescent psychiatry at UNC. Dr. Gertner’s research focuses on state and federal policies that impact access to SUD services, as well as the role of primary care in the treatment of opioid use disorder. His research uses multi-methods that combine rigorous econometric techniques with patient-centered qualitative approaches and is an expert in using claims and existing national data resources, like the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey.
Paul Lanier, PhD, MSW
Paul Lanier is the Kuralt Distinguished Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Social Work. He received a Ph.D. in Social Work from Washington University St. Louis and was a T32 NIMH Fellow at the Center for Mental Health Services Research. Dr. Lanier is an expert in services research and focuses on testing and expanding access to evidence-based interventions and policies that promote child and family well-being. His research primarily leverages large administrative databases to study the effectiveness of programs and policies in the context of rigorous intervention studies. He also leads a statewide initiative on workforce development for expanding mental health promotion in early childhood systems at with NC Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Association.
Erica Richman, PhD, MSW
Erica Richman is a health services researcher and the Associate Director of Information Technology for Research Engagement at the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at UNC-Chapel Hill. Dr. Richman splits her time between studying how health care systems deploy their workforces to meet the physical, behavioral, and social needs of vulnerable populations and coordinating and maintaining large health datasets to promote research on the incidence and prevalence of disease, patterns of utilization and treatment, and cost of care. She received her Ph.D. from the UNC-CH and her MSW from the University of Pennsylvania.
Sarah E. Bledsoe, PhD, MPhil, MSW
Sarah E. Bledsoe is an Associate Professor at the UNC-CH SSW and Co-Director of the National Initiative on Trauma Education and Workforce Development, a National Child Traumatic Stress Network Category II Center with a focus on equity and reducing disparities in evidence-based trauma treatment for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. She received a Ph.D. and MPhil from Columbia University and an MSW from the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Bledsoe has over two decades of transdisciplinary research experience focusing on behavioral and mental health outcomes. Her primary research expertise includes examining interventions, evidence-based practice, and workforce development for at-risk individuals and families impacted by psychiatric illnesses and trauma, with a focus on the perinatal period.
Danya K. Krueger, MSW, MBA
Danya K. Krueger is a second-year PhD student at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Social Work and a Graduate Research Assistant with the UNC-BHWRC. She earned a Master of Social Work from The Ohio State University and a Master of Business Administration from Boise State University. Prior to doctoral studies, Danya served as lead research associate at Boise State University School of Social Work in collaboration with the State of Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. She has also worked as a licensed mental health professional in University Health Services at Boise State University and as an adjunct instructor at the College of Western Idaho. Currently, Dr. Lisa de Saxe Zerden serves as Danya’s primary research mentor. Danya’s research interests concentrate on serving and improving the health and wellbeing of the healthcare workforce through prevention-based and community-engaged intervention research.