PRBA Faculty Associates

Philip Bowman

Phillip Bowman Director, Diversity Research and Policy Program (DRPP)
Faculty Associate, Research Center for Group Dynamics, ISR
Professor, Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education

BS, Psychology/Industrial Technology, 1970, Northern Arizona University
MA Counseling Psychology,1971, University of Michigan
EdS, Student Affairs in Higher Education,1973, University of Michigan
MA, Social Psychology, 1974,University of Michigan
PhD, Social Psychology, 1977,University of Michigan

[email protected]

More about Philip Bowman

Professor Bowman’s scholarship focuses on diversity issues in research methodology, higher education and public policy; social psychological issues in racial/ethnic disparities, and African American Studies. He is an active national and international lecturer and consultant on diversity issues in research methodology, higher education and public policy.

Ronald Brown

Associate Professor
Wayne State University

B.A., Political Science, 1974, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
Ph.D., Political Science, 1984, University of Michigan

[email protected]

More about Ronald Brown

Dr. Watkins specializes in mixed methods research, combining both qualitative and quantitative methods and data to produce knowledge that improves health equity among marginalized individuals and communities. Her substantive areas of interest are mental health, masculinity, and social support among marginalized boys and men. Specifically, her research investigates within-group differences among Black boys and men to better understand implications of race, gender, age, and culture on Black males’ mental health. As the founder of the Gender and Health Research (GendHR) Lab and the Young Black Men, Masculinities the and Mental Health (YBMen) Project, Watkins has explored how boys and men’s self-identify and their adherence to conventional masculine norms to increase understanding of their experiences with mental health in the context of social stigmatization, and to increase their awareness of and access to treatment.

Ishtar Govia

Lecturer, Caribbean Institute for Health Research (CAIHR) – Epidemiology Research Unit
The University of the West Indies, Mona Campus
Kingston 7, Jamaica

[email protected]

More about Ishtar Govia

Dr. Ishtar Govia is a Lecturer in Epidemiology at the Caribbean Institute for Health Research , UWI Mona where she is the Institute’s lead for the Mental Health. She is trained as a research psychologist, is an expert in mixed methods and implementation science, and is dedicated to gender- and equity-sensitive research on holistic and integrated prevention and management of non-communicable diseases. She is the PI of the Caribbean Migrations: Jamaica Return(ed) Migrant Study. Dr. Govia’s current projects include the Jamaica arm of a multi-country dementia care systems improvement study called Strengthening Responses to Dementia in Developing Countries (STRiDE) project and a follow up to the collaborative Caribbean Foodscapes project called “Transdisciplinary data assemblages for a socio-historical understanding of the formation of Caribbean food systems”.

Cleopatra Howard Caldwell

Chair and Professor, Department of Health Behavior and Health Education, School of Public Health
Director, Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture and Health
Faculty Associate, Research Center for Group Dynamics, ISR

B.S., Psychology, 1973, North Carolina A & T State University
MA, Human Development, 1975, Wayne State University
M.A., Psychology, 1983, University of Michigan
Ph.D., Social Psychology, 1986, University of Michigan

[email protected]

More about Cleopatra Howard Caldwell

Dr. Cleopatra Howard Caldwell is Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education and Director of the Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture, and Health (CRECH) at the School of Public Health, University of Michigan. She is also a Faculty Associate with the Program for Research on Black Americans (PRBA) at the Institute for Social Research and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan. As a social psychologist with expertise in psychosocial and environmental factors influencing the health and well-being of Black populations, her research includes both intervention and basic research involving survey research techniques with adults, adolescents and families. She also has expertise in conducting community-based participatory research (CBPR), developing academic-community partnerships to design and evaluate health interventions for Black youth and their family. Specific examples include the NICHD/NIH funded Parenting and Men’s Health Study, the CDC funded Fathers and Sons Evaluation Project, and the Ruth Mott Foundation funded Fathers and Sons Physical Activity and Nutrition Program. She has published in a number of areas including the influence of social relationships and social identities on the health and well-being of Black adolescents, the role of paternal support, racial discrimination, and racial identity attitudes as risk or protective factors for adolescent risky behaviors and fatherhood as a context for understanding men’s health. Further, Dr. Caldwell has extensive experience conducting research to understand health risk behaviors and mental health of ethnically diverse adolescents, including African American and Caribbean Black youth.

Mosi Adesina Ifatunji

Assistant Professor, UW Madison
Department of Afro American Studies
Department of Sociology
Center for Demography and Ecology

B.A., Psychology and African American Studies, 2003 University of Illinois at Chicago
M.A., Sociology, 2006, University of Illinois at Chicago

Ph.D., Sociology, 2011, University of Illinois at Chicago

[email protected]

More about Mosi Adesina Ifatunji

Mosi Adesina Ifatunji is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Afro American Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison where he is also a Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Sociology and the Center for Demography and Ecology. Before joining the faculty at UW Madison, Dr. Ifatunji taught at the Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor and in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His primary research and teaching interests are in racial and ethnic theory and the methods used to study inequality and stratification. His work has been published in Sociological Forum, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity and the Du Bois Review.

Krim Lacey

Assistant Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies
University of Michigan, Dearborn

[email protected]

More about Krim Lacey

Dr. Lacey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and African and African American Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. His primary research is on intimate partner violence, focusing on minority and immigrant populations. He has also been engaged in research that addresses the influence of social context and cultural factors on the physical and mental well-being of Caribbeans residing in the United States, Canada and England, and within the Caribbean region. Krim earned his doctorate from Wayne State University. He also received post-doctoral training from both the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research at the Program for Research on Black Americans (PRBA) and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Harold W. Neighbors

Professor of Public Health
Michigan State University College of Human Medicine
Professor Emeritus of Public Health, University of Michigan School of Public Health
Research Professor Emeritus, Institute for Social Research.

Ph.D., Social Psychology 1982, University of Michigan
M.A., Social/Community Psychology, 1979, University of Michigan
B.A., Psychology, 1975, Haverford College

[email protected]

More about Harold W. Neighbors

Dr. Neighbors is an applied social psychologist with a methodological background in survey research. He has spent the bulk of his career writing on racial, ethnic, and gender disparities in mental health. He began is research career by studying the help-seeking behavior of Black Americans with serious personal problems. Later, Dr. Neighbors worked on the measurement of mental disorder in treatment settings and the general population. He has also studied the mental health implications of social mobility among Black Americans. In 2015, he left the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) to help build the Division of Public Health at the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine (Flint). The purpose of this move was to bring medicine and public health closer together by training medical students in research on the social determinants of population health disparities. He also moved to Flint to conduct community-based lifestyle intervention research to improve the self-management of chronic disease among Black men. He is currently developing strategies to package research findings for those with the power to change the socioeconomic conditions that overpower individual effort.

Daphne C. Watkins

Professor, School of Social Work
Director, Vivian A. and James L. Curtis School of Social Work Center for Health Equity Research and Training
Faculty Associate, Research Center for Group Dynamics, ISR
University of Michigan

B.A., Anthropology, 2002, University of North Carolina at Wilmington
Ph.D., Health Education, 2006,Texas A&M University

[email protected]

More about Daphne C. Watkins

R. Khari Brown

Associate Professor
Wayne State University
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Department of Sociology

B.A., Sociology, 1998, Wayne State University
MSW, Social Work, 2001, University of Michigan
Ph.D., Sociology, 2004, University of Michigan

[email protected]

More about R. Khari Brown

R. Khari Brown, an associate professor of sociology at Wayne State University, is a leading expert of religion and American politics. He is also an adjunct research scientist at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan and a research consultant at the Pew Research Center where he develops national surveys on race, religion, and politics. He serves on the board of the Religious Research Association and the editorial board of the Politics and Religion Journal and the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. His published work examines race differences in how attending worship settings in which clergy and lay persons discuss political matters reinforces beliefs about the American government’s role in addressing; poverty, racism, immigration, criminal justice, and defense issues. This work appears in numerous academic journals and is featured on NPR’s The Academic Minute.

Linda M. Chatters

Paula Allen-Meares Collegiate Professor, School of Social Work
Professor, Health Behavior and Health Education, School of Public Health
Faculty Associate, Research Center for Group Dynamics, ISR
University of Michigan

A.B., Psychology, 1975, University of California Berkeley
Ph.D., Psychology, 1983, University of Michigan

[email protected]

More about Linda M. Chatters

Dr. Chatters’ research focuses on adult development and aging in relation to the mental and physical health status and functioning of older persons in a variety of social contexts (i.e., the family, church, and community). She is also interested in religious involvement among African Americans and the independent effects of religious, personal, and social status factors on personal well-being. Dr. Chatters is a Fellow, Behavioral and Social Sciences Section of The Gerontological Society of America and the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare. Dr. Chatters has also recently been designated by Thomson-ISI® as a Highly Cited Researcher™ in the Category of General Social Sciences.

David M. Fresco

Professor, Department of Psychiatry
Research Professor, Institute for Social Research
University of Michigan

More about David M. Fresco

Dr. Fresco is a clinical psychologist who has maintained an active program of research to develop and optimize psychosocial interventions for refractory presentations of emotional disorders (e.g., anxious depression & distress disorders) as well as well as chronic health conditions (e.g., hypertension). He has been fortunate to foster cross-cutting and multidisciplinary collaborations that have allowed us to pursue a broader scope of treatment optimization while beginning to address facets of health disparities.

Joseph Himle

Howard V. Brabson Collegiate Professor and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs
University of Michigan

B.A., Psychology, 1983, University of Michigan
M.S.W., 1984, University of Michigan
Ph.D., 1995, Social Work and Psychology, University of Michigan

[email protected]

More about Joseph Himle

Joseph A. Himle, Ph.D., is the Howard V. Brabson Collegiate Professor of Social Work and Professor of Psychiatry, School of Medicine at the University of Michigan. He is also the Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at the School of Social Work. Professor Himle is an active clinician, teacher, and researcher in the area of mental health disorders and therapeutic interventions. Professor Himle has served as principal investigator or co-investigator on 14 NIH-funded research projects. He is the currently principal investigator of an NIMH-funded multi-site project focusing on the design, development and testing of an intervention for unemployed persons with social anxiety. Professor Himle has published over 130 articles and book chapters related to the field of mental health and cognitive-behavioral therapy. Finally, Professor Himle is an internationally known mentor and educator in the field of mental health and cognitive-behavioral therapy. He has been honored three times as “Teacher of the Year” in the Department of Psychiatry and was recently recognized as a “Distinguished Clinical and Translational Research Mentor” by the Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research.

Anthony King

Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychology
Faculty Associate, Research Center for Group Dynamics, Institute for Social Research
Faculty Associate, Michigan Diabetes Research Center

MS, Clinical Psychology, Rutgers The State University of New Jersey
PhD, Clinical Psychology, Fielding Graduate University, Santa Barbara
PhD, Molecular & Integrative Physiology, The University of Michigan

[email protected]

More about Anthony King

Dr. King’s lab studies how stress and trauma affect people: how they affect the brain leading to alterations in large-scale neural networks and in emotion, cognition, reward, decision making, and mental health; how they can affect neuroendocrine (e.g. the HPA axis and sympathoadrenal system) and immune system function; and how these effects can affect physical health and disease risk. He is interested in health disparities in Black Americans and other marginalized groups, who have disproportionate exposures to stress and trauma, the effects of experience of racism, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and chronic pain, interaction between comorbidities that often affect traumatized people, and gene x environment interactions that may underlie individual differences. He is a licensed psychologist/ psychotherapist specializing in PTSD, anxiety, and depression and studies neural network and physiological mechanisms underlying psychotherapeutic changes in people with PTSD. He has clinical trials of Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and pre-post fMRI neuroimaging studies currently actively recruiting.

Jamie Mitchell

Associate Professor of Social Work
Co-Director of the Community Liaison and Recruitment Core for the Michigan Center for Urban African American Aging Research
University of Michigan

B.A., Psychology, 2005, Ohio State University
M.S.W., Social Work, University of Tennessee Health

Ph.D., Social Work, 2010, Ohio State University

[email protected]

More about Jamie Mitchell

Dr. Mitchell’s interdisciplinary research examines how patient-centered communication between older African American men, their families and physicians can be leveraged to improve men’s cancer and chronic disease outcomes and patient experiences. She also develops, tests and adapts eHealth and psycho-educational interventions designed to support the communication efficacy and disease self-management of older Black men. In her role as Co-Director of the Community Liaison and Recruitment Core for the Michigan Center for Urban African American Aging Research (MCUAAAR), Dr. Mitchell helps to oversee a research infrastructure grounded in recruiting and retaining older Black adults for health sciences research with the goal of increasing their representation in health discoveries. A key component of that work includes co-managing a community advisory board and participant research registry of Black older adults at the Healthier Black Elders Center in Detroit. In 2020, Jamie, alongside Dr. James Jackson, will spearhead a major expansion of MCUAAAR’s research recruitment activities and infrastructure to Flint, Michigan.

Julie Ober Allen

NIA Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Population Studies Center
University of Michigan

[email protected]

More about Julie Ober Allen

Dr. Allen’s research seeks to better understand and address the complex interactions between contextual, psychosocial, biological, and behavioral factors involved in stress and coping processes that contribute to disparities in chronic disease among older U.S. adults, with an emphasis on the health of Black men. Her current projects investigate the characteristics of stressor exposure (e.g., timing in the life course, number, severity, chronicity, life domain) most salient for biobehavioral stress processes, such as HPA axis dysregulation and self-regulatory coping behaviors (e.g., responding to stressors by eating high sugar/fat foods, smoking, exercising, meditating). She is also examining how these biobehavioral processes contribute to development, progression, and disparities in cardiovascular, metabolic, and mental health outcomes among midlife and older adults.