Meet Our Research Team
Co-investigators
Richard Gonzalez, PhD
Co-investigator
More About Richard
Richard Gonzalez, PhD is an Amos N. Tversky Professor of Psychology and Statistics at the University of Michigan. He is Director of the BioSocial Methods Collaborative and the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Institute for Social Research. He also holds appointments in Bioinformatics, the Center for Human Growth and Development, Ross School of Business/Marketing, the College of Engineering and the Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Gonzalez’s main research areas are methodology and judgement/decision making. You might see him around town on his bike as he enjoys meeting collaborators in their home environments.
Theodore J. Iwashyna, MD, PhD
Co-investigator
More About Jack
Theodore “Jack” Iwashyna, MD, PhD is a Professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Michigan, where his clinical practice is as a medical intensivist. He is also part of the Survey Research Center at the Institute for Social Research and the Center for Clinical Management Research at the Ann Arbor VA HSR&D Center of Excellence. Dr. Iwashyna’s research seeks to understand the context of critical illness, both how critical illness influences a patient’s life course, and how the organizational environment influences the effectiveness of the care that a patient receives. His clinical work in the University of Michigan’s and Veteran’s Administration Hospital medical intensive care units emphasize medical critical care, including severe sepsis, ARDS and high complexity patients.
Amanda Leggett, PhD, MS
Co-investigator
More About Amanda
Amanda Leggett, PhD, MS is a Research Assistant Professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry at Michigan Medicine. Dr. Leggett’s research focuses primarily on caregivers of individuals with dementia. Specifically, she examines caregivers’ styles of care management and how those styles are associated with health services utilization for their care recipient with dementia and themselves. She has also collaborated with colleagues on a M‐Cubed project looking at care for dementia patients within Michigan Medicine and using LEAN thinking techniques to consider quality improvements related to care for dementia patients.
Hallie Prescott, MD, MS
Co-investigator
More About Hallie
Hallie Prescott, MD, MS is an Associate Professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Michigan. Dr. Prescott conducts health services research to understand and improve the long-term outcomes of acute medical illnesses, drawing on the tools of ‘big data’ analytics and implementation science. Her initial focus is reducing the need for repeated hospitalization after severe sepsis, including an examination of hospital readmission and healthcare utilization among sepsis survivors, with a goal of helping develop novel clinical interventions to improve recovery and reduce healthcare utilization among this population.
Sheria G. Robinson-Lane, PhD, RN
Co-investigator
More About Sheria
Sheria Robinson-Lane, PhD, RN is a gerontologist with expertise in palliative care, long-term care, and nursing administration. She has focused her career on the care and support of older adults with cognitive and/or functional disabilities. Dr. Robinson-Lane is interested in the ways that older adults adapt to changes in health, and particularly how adaptive coping strategies effect health outcomes. Her research is focused on reducing health disparities for minority older adults with cognitive impairments and their informal caregivers. Prior to coming to coming to the University of Michigan School of Nursing, Dr. Robinson-Lane completed an NIH-funded advanced research rehabilitation training program in community living and participation with the University of Michigan Medical School.
Research Staff
Elaina Baker
Research Assistant
More About Elaina
Elaina Baker is a junior at the University of Michigan studying both Music and Biopsychology, Cognition, and Neuroscience. She holds additional research positions in both psychiatry and pediatric emergency medicine, in projects relating to adolescent suicide prevention and improving pediatric Emergency Department care. Elaina hopes to apply to medical school after graduation from UM with intent to become a doctor.
Natalie Leonard, MS
Research Technician
More About Natalie
Natalie Leonard, MS is a Research Technician as part of the BioSocial Methods Collaborative team. She received her BS of Psychology from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2018 and her MS of Architecture Research from the University of Michigan in 2019. Natalie’s interest is where psychology and architecture meet: How can architecture apply evidence-based, human-centered design? How might the design of our healthcare systems and environments change? She approaches human subjects research from an emphatic perspective: minding interactions between research staff, participants and the surrounding environment with implications for ethics, reproducibility and data quality.
Jillian Peacock, MS
Research Data Analyst
More About Jillian
Jillian Peacock, MS is a Research Data Analyst at the BioSocial Methods Collaborative. She has a background in Mechanical Engineering with her MS in Information Science. She is particularly interested in providing insightful analytics and making data accessible. A bike-commuter and active-living proponent, she can often be found running or walking Ann Arbor’s streets, and she hopes to combine her engineering background, data science skills, and passion for sport and physical activity to enable active lifestyles throughout her career.
Maren Wisniewski, BS
Research Assistant
More About Maren
Maren Wisniewski is a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, with a BS in Movement Science and a minor in Food & the Environment. She will be attending Northwestern University in the upcoming fall to obtain a Doctor of Physical Therapy. Maren has been with the BioSocial Methods Collaborative since the spring of 2018, where she has worked on protocol development and implementation for a number of studies. Maren is especially interested in the way different health conditions can affect someone’s ability to perform activities of daily living, and hopes to further investigate methods for identifying areas of struggle in the home and strategies to provide better support.
Alicia G. Carmichael, MS
Research Process Manager
More About Alicia
Alicia G. Carmichael, MS joined the BioSocial Methods Collaborative in 2014. She oversees the life cycle of research projects as the Collaborative’s Research Process Manager. On a day-to-day basis, her work covers a wide range of activities including testing new physiological sensors for the lab, participating in research planning sessions, writing IRB applications, managing data in various programs, developing protocols, designing and programming surveys, and mentoring students. Her research interest is in public engagement with genetic information, but life at the Collaborative means she’s ready for anything!
Sophia Li, BSN
Research Assistant
More About Sophia
Sophia Li recently completed her Bachelor’s in Nursing and plans on practicing in the Chicago area in the fall. In addition to working at the BioSocial Methods Collaborative, she has also done interdisciplinary research regarding maternal-infant feeding habits and global health design initiatives. As a nurse, she has a personal interest in continuity of care throughout an individual’s hospitalization as well as after. She hopes to learn more about potential gaps in this care that can be done to provide better quality and effective care for patients and their caregivers.
Sadia Rahman
Research Assistant
More About Sadia
Sadia Rahman is a first-year undergraduate student at the University of Michigan studying Biopsychology Cognition and Neuroscience. This is her first year at the Biosocial Methods Collaborative. She is interested in attending medical school and becoming a child psychiatrist.
JJ Wright
Research Assistant
More About JJ
JJ Wright is a current undergraduate senior at the University of Michigan, working towards a BS in Biopsychology, Cognition, and Neuroscience and Gender and Health. She has been with the BioSocial Methods Collaborative since the fall of 2017 where she has worked on the development and implementation of numerous interdisciplinary studies. JJ has a personal interest in health sciences and data collection and hopes to obtain a masters in information science after graduation.
Jeannette Jackson, MBA
Managing Director
More About Jeannette
Jeannette Jackson, MBA joined Dr. Richard Gonzalez in 2013 to launch the BioSocial Methods Collaborative – a university-wide core supporting the innovation of biosocial methods. She comes to this work after receiving her MBA from the U-M Ross School of Business and running a consulting company focused on organizational change and leadership development for industry, non-profits and higher education. Now she practices what she preaches, as change is a continual condition at the Collaborative. She considers it a privilege to be working with this amazing team.
Tanbirul Miah
Research Assistant
More About Tanbirul
Tanbirul is a current undergraduate junior at the University of Michigan, studying Information Analysis. He has been with the BioSocial Methods Collaborative since the fall of 2019 and has worked on a variety of studies conducted by the lab. He has an interest in building data structures and collecting data and aims to pursue a career in data analytics after graduation.
Tannaz Sabetfakhri, MA
Research Area Specialist
More About Tannaz
Tannaz Sabetfakhri, MA joined the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) in 2001, part of the Institute for Social Research (ISR). During her 12 years working at ISR/ICPSR, she worked with many different projects and held different positions. She left ISR/ICSPR in 2013 and began working at an adoption agency in Detroit, MI. In 2017, she returned to ISR as part of the Research Center for Group Dynamics (RCGD), working with Dr. L. Rowell Huesmann and Dr. Eric F. Dubow on the Aggression Research Program. She is currently sharing her time between the Aggression Research Program and the HEART Project. Tannaz has a MA in Counseling Psychology from Adler University and enjoys gardening and traveling.
Lee A. Kamphuis, MPH
Project Manager
More About Lee
Lee A. Kamphuis, MPH is a Project Manager at the Ann Arbor VA HSR&D Center for Clinical Management Research. She has been the project manager for several multi-site VA projects, including Iwashyna’s 5-site “Recovery after In-Hospital Cardiac Arrest: Late Outcomes & Utilization (ResCU)” project. Ms. Kamphuis has over a decade of experience in project oversight and coordination. She has repeatedly project managed surveys of health status and quality of life, often including sensitive topics. For example, she managed the Tobacco Tactics program, which included the implementation and evaluation of a nurse-administered smoking cessation intervention, including 6 simultaneous sites, as well as the PETAL-network-wide FUNCTION follow-up calls of the ROSE randomized clinical trial and the ongoing follow-up calls for the CLOVERS trial.
Grace Oxford, BS
Research Assistant
More About Grace
Grace Oxford recently graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in Neuroscience. Grace has worked with the BioSocial Methods Collaborative as a Research Assistant for the past year. Grace’s research interests include human behavior and interaction.
Donna Walter, BA
Participant Coordinator
More About Donna
Donna Walter joined the Institute for Social Research as a Research Technician in 2000. She enjoyed working with Dr. Jere Johnston on his two key projects: Project IDEAL and Adult Education Online. She joined the BioSocial Methods Collaborative in fall of 2013 as a Data Manager and Participant Coordinator. She enjoys working on the many research projects that the collaborative is involved in, especially working with the participants for the studies. Donna enjoys reading, gardening and traveling when she is not in the office.
Andrew Lemmen
Research Assistant
More About Andrew
Andrew Lemmen is a rising senior studying Neuroscience and a Research Assistant at the BioSocial Methods Collaborative. He has been with the Collaborative for three years and has worked on a broad spectrum of topics within psychology and physiology. He is interested in attending medical school and becoming a doctor, with a tentative interest in psychiatry. His research experience further includes psychiatry as it relates to criminality and drug abuse.
Janeann Paratore
Research Assistant
More About Janeann
Janeann Paratore is currently a sophomore earning a BS in Biopsychology, Cognition and Neuroscience at the University of Michigan. After graduating, she plans on attending medical school. Janeann started at the Biosocial Methods Collaborative in the summer of 2020.
Mari Wank, BS
Graduate Research Assistant
More About Mari
Mari Wank has a BS in Statistics from Carnegie Mellon University and is currently pursuing her MS in Biostatistics at the University of Michigan. Mari previously worked as a Research Technician for the BioSocial Methods Collaborative before pursuing her graduate degree. She continues to do collaborative research with the team as she pursues her graduate studies. Mari’s research interests include how statistics and novel study design can be utilized to better understand and improve patient outcomes.