Meet the Family Medicine Research Team

Dr. Amy Williams is a practicing family physician and researcher whose work focuses on child obesity, especially in low-income and racial and ethnic minority families. She is investigating the influence of stress from racial discrimination on child obesity, clinic and community-based approaches to preventing and treating childhood obesity, as well as policy initiatives to remove soda from children’s menus.

Profile

Dr. Canfield's research agenda includes health promotion and equity, emphasizing women's health, particularly mental health in the reproductive period, and improving access to care. Her research program includes three overarching areas: 1) developing and implementing interventions to support the needs of women and families throughout the perinatal period, 2) exploring the efficacy of using technology-mediated interventions in health promotion, 3) engaging in health equity research prioritizing community engagement and access to care.

Profile

Dr. Kevin Everett’s research is focused on making it harder for youth to start using tobacco and also making it easier for them to quit using tobacco. He also wants to eliminate the population’s exposure to the toxic chemicals produced by tobacco use. His projects include organizing youth leadership programs designed to prevent tobacco use, developing innovative treatments to help people quit smoking and supporting coalition-building approaches to creating healthier smoke-free environments in the workplace.

Profile

Dr. Richelle Koopman is committed to promoting EHR design that makes it easy for patients and physicians to make good decisions to improve health. She seeks to leverage improved data visualization, electronic support for decision making and patient-physician information sharing to enable people with chronic conditions and their physicians to make well-informed shared decisions that lead to better health outcomes.

Having patients contribute their own data to the EHR to aid in decision making is an emerging trend in health care. Dr. Koopman has led an effort to bring home blood pressure data, including better data visualization, to the clinical EHR to help patients and physicians make better shared decisions about hypertension control.

Profile

Dr. Melissa Lewis partners with indigenous communities to revitalize traditional lifeways that can ameliorate the negative effects of colonization, thereby improving health and well-being. By revitalizing traditional beliefs, activities, culture and language, native communities are healing themselves from historical loss and trauma.

In her research, Dr. Lewis has partnered with communities to create training protocols for mental and medical health professionals to provide better care for indigenous patients and clients. She also partners with her own tribe, Cherokee Nation, to evaluate and co‐create programs aimed to reduce cardiovascular disease by harnessing the power of cultural learning.

Profile

Dr. Jane McElroy is an epidemiologist interested in influencing the trajectory of chronic diseases, with particular emphasis on cancer. She has explored cancer etiology through biomarker and spatial analyses; patterns of disease incidence and prevalence associated with environmental exposures and urban-rural status; and psychosocial needs among cancer patients. Her other area of research focuses on improving health status among sexual and gender minority (SGM; aka LGBTQ) individuals. She has worked on increasing breast cancer screening among black women, improving lesbian and bisexual women’s health through achieving a healthy weight and exploring tobacco use among SGM individuals.

Profile

Dr. David Mehr a family physician, geriatrician and health services researcher whose history of funded research has focused on improving care of older adults. He has received four major federal grants, several foundation grants and has been a co-investigator on numerous other projects.

Dr. Mehr’s studies have included projects on outcomes of lower respiratory infections in nursing home residents, pneumonia as a terminal event in dementia, and using health information technology innovations at MU to improve ambulatory chronic illness care. He was awarded a $4.5 million grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in 2013 to develop infrastructure to support patient-centered outcomes research.

Profile

Alex Henigman is a dedicated medical librarian focused on leveraging library and information science to enhance evidence-based medicine. She supports all stages of the research cycle, with particular expertise in expert searching, data management, and systematic reviews. Alex is committed to improving patient outcomes and community health by assisting researchers and clinicians in identifying high-quality literature, providing training in information organization, and staying current with best practices in research, information, and data management. Her personal interests include exploring the impact of artificial intelligence on consumer health information-seeking behaviors and utilizing public libraries for healthy living programs.

alexhenigman@health.missouri.edu

Jamie Smith conducts statistical analysis on a variety of faculty and surgical research projects, including database development, data collection, interpretation of findings, and manuscript/grant preparation.

smithjami@health.missouri.edu

Nuha Wareg assists on research projects that focus on an EMR clinic decision tool that aims to address childhood obesity, EHR-documented home blood pressure readings, and chronic disease/end of life research.

WaregN@health.missouri.edu