Assistant Professor of Maternal and Child Health, UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health
Anna Austin, PhD, MPH, is an assistant professor in the Department of Maternal and Child Health and core faculty at the UNC Injury Prevention Research Center. She is trained in epidemiology and maternal and child health with a research focus on injury and violence prevention.
Her current research centers on the primary prevention of adverse childhood experiences, specifically child abuse and neglect; promoting access to substance use disorder treatment, including among pregnant and parenting people and the Medicaid population; and population-level strategies, including those that address social determinants of health, to prevent injuries and violence and promote overall health and wellbeing.
The translational impact of her research is informed by longstanding partnerships with multiple national, state, and local agencies, including the North Carolina Divisions of Public Health and Health Benefits and the Wake County Division of Child Welfare. She is currently the PI of a CDC-funded R01 to examine the association of state adoption of policies that expand Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) eligibility with rates of multiple forms of violence, mental health, and substance use outcomes and is a North Carolina site-PI for the Medicaid Outcomes Distributed Research Network (MODRN). Link to Profile
Research Scientist, UNC Injury Prevention Research Center
Mike Fliss, PhD, MPS, MSW, has worked in public health epidemiology and informatics at the county and state level in North Carolina since 2010. He graduated from Duke University with a double major in computer science and philosophy, then from UNC-CH with a Master’s of Social Work with a concentration in management and community practice, with separate certificates from both Duke and UNC in Nonprofit Management and Leadership. He completed his Master’s of Biomedical Health Informatics (Public Health Informatics concentration) and PhD in Epidemiology at UNC Chapel Hill. His current work is in social, injury, environmental, and spatial epidemiology, and includes opioid overdose, violent deaths, tobacco and alcohol environment control, child maltreatment, industrial animal farms, disparities in policing, and public health informatics.
L. Richardson Preyer Distinguished Chair for Strengthening Families, School of Social Work
Rebecca J. Macy, PhD, MSW, is a researcher and social worker with many years of experience conducting community-engaged studies that focus on intimate partner violence, sexual violence, and human trafficking. She is committed to preventing violence among vulnerable populations and has used her prior experience as a community-based social worker to inform her research in violence prevention and to improving services for survivors of violence. She has conducted investigations in various community settings in collaboration with survivors, service providers, and policymakers. Macy is experienced in leading projects and teams that have developed manuals, toolkits, and outcomes to promote community-based and survivor-centered research. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Family Violence. Link to Profile
Associate Professor of Maternal and Child Health, UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health
Meghan E. Shanahan, PhD, MPH’s research focus is to improve the health and developmental trajectories of children. Her research focuses on adverse events that potentially influence these trajectories and prevent children from realizing their full potential. Child maltreatment is one obvious insult to the health and development of children. Documenting the magnitude, etiology, and impact of child maltreatment has been a major focus of her work. Examining prevention strategies to reduce child abuse and neglect is another main focal point of her research. Link to Profile
Professor of Emergency Medicine
Anna E. Waller, ScD, is the director for the Carolina Center for Health Informatics (CCHI) and Principle Investigator/Science Director for the North Carolina Disease Event Tracking and Epidemiologic Collection Tool (NC DETECT). She has worked in public health surveillance for more than 25 years and in injury prevention and control for over 35 years. She collaborates with the IPRC and the NC Injury & Violence Prevention Branch on data driven responses to the opioid overdose epidemic in NC, as well as broader injury and violence surveillance efforts. Waller also works with the NC Governor’s Highway Safety Program on an ongoing effort to link motor vehicle crash data with health outcomes. Waller works with the NC Division of Public Health on a variety of projects using emergency department visit and EMS response data for public health surveillance, including ongoing collaborations with public health practitioners at the state and local levels to develop surveillance case definitions and reports using NC DETECT data. Waller is interested in using data effectively to inform public health response and prevention activities. Link to Profile
Adjunct Associate Professor of Health Behavior
Professor, Public Health Leadership Progam, UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, Oliver R. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Surgery, UNC School of Medicine
