Core Team

Mahnoosh (Mona) Sharifi, MD, MPH is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics (General Pediatrics) and Biostatistics (Health Informatics), Director of the Yale Scholars in Implementation Science K12 program, and Co-director of the National Clinician Scholars Program at Yale. Dr. Sharifi is a board-certified general pediatrician practicing in pediatric primary care and a health services researcher focused on studying the implementation of interventions in pediatric primary care and community-based settings to prevent chronic diseases and promote equity, focusing on childhood obesity prevention and treatment. Dr. Sharifi completed her undergraduate degrees in biological science: biology and economics at Emory University, her medical degree at Vanderbilt University, and her residency in pediatrics at the Boston Combined Residency in Pediatrics. After formal training in health services, public health, and patient-centered outcomes research as part of an AHRQ T32-funded fellowship in pediatric health services research and a K12 scholars program, both at Harvard, she completed a K08 career development award to further develop expertise in the field of implementation science and clinical informatics. She is currently PI of two multi-site NIH-funded R01 projects to study the dissemination and implementation of interventions for obesity in children and adolescents. With continuous federal funding support of her research from the AHRQ, NIH, and CDC since 2010, Dr. Sharifi has experience working with and leading transdisciplinary teams that are inclusive of students and trainees and has completed several successful projects applying qualitative, quantitative, mixed methods, and implementation research methods.

Leslie Curry, PhD, MPH, is Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Yale School of Public Health, Professor of Management at Yale School of Management, Lecturer in Yale College, Associate Director of the Yale Scholars in Implementation Science Program, and core faculty at the Yale Global Health Leadership Initiative. Leslie’s research focuses on management, culture and organizational performance in diverse health care settings in the U.S. and internationally. She is especially interested in the development and scale up of innovative, evidence-based health practices, programs and policies and regularly collaborates with health and social care providers in these efforts. Leslie was a Public Voices Thought Leader Fellow in 2016-17. Leslie's work has been published in JAMA, American Journal of Public Health, Health Affairs, Annals of Internal Medicine and the BMJ, and featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR and ABC News. Leslie's current primary research portfolio includes: 1) MPI on an NIH R01 funded effort, Champions Advancing Racial Equity in Sepsis (CARES) to develop and evaluate a coalition-based leadership intervention to equip health systems and their surrounding communities to mitigate structural racism and drive measurable reductions in inequities in sepsis outcomes, 2) Yale core team for Equitable Breakthroughs in Medicine Development (EQBMED), a national collaboration to increase diversity in clinical trials and address systemicbarriers to participation by communities of color, 3) Implementation evaluation lead for All of Us (Yale site), a large-scale NIH funded national initiative with a goal of enrolling one million or more participants, particularly those who are under-represented in biomedical research, and 4) Co-investigator with Dr. Dowin Boatright on an NIH funded R01, Developing an Evidence-Based Toolkit to Improve Diversity in the Physician-Scientist Workforce. She also supports colleagues and mentees across the Yale Schools of Medicine and Public health working on implementation science and community-driven projects. Her work has been supported by a variety of funders including NIH, AHRQ, The Commonwealth Fund, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and The World Bank. Leslie is a recognized expert in qualitative and mixed methods and regularly teaches at the undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate levels. She is co-author of Mixed Methods in the Health Sciences: A Practical Primer, commissioned by Sage Publications, 2014.

I am a pulmonary/critical care physician and epidemiologist using translational research and implementation science to improve diagnostic evaluation and case finding for tuberculosis (TB), the leading cause of infectious death worldwide. I teach a graduate course on implementation science and mentor students at the Yale School of Public Health, and am involved in several international research training programs focused on implementation science. I am also a Yale Medicine physician, and attend in the Medical Intensive Care Unit and the Winchester TB Clinic at Yale-New Haven Hospital, caring for patients and their families and teaching medical students, residents, and fellows.

Dr. Fiellin has focused his scholarly work on the interface between primary care, general healthcare settings and addiction. He is an Internal Medicine physician Board Certified in Addiction Medicine.  He serves as the inaugural Director of the Yale Program in Addiction Medicine. He conducts research on the transfer of treatments for opioid use disorder and alcohol use disorder from specialized settings to office-based, primary care, Emergency Department and HIV specialty settings. He has served as Principal Investigator on multiple NIH-funded research clinical trials, observational studies and implementation science. He has received awards from the American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence,  the American Society of Addiction Medicine, AMERSA and the  the Hazelden-Betty Ford Foundation. He is on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Addiction Medicine, Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, and Substance Abuse and is Co-Editor of Alcohol, Other Drugs & Health: Current Evidence and the Principles of Addiction Medicine, 4th, 5th and 6th Editions. He has served on the Board of Directors of the College on Problems of Drug Dependence and as Co-Chair of the Substance Abuse Task Force for the Society of General Internal Medicine.

Dr. Nunez-Smith is Inaugural Associate Dean for Health Equity Research; C.N.H Long Professor of Internal Medicine, Public Health, and Management; Founding Director of the Equity Research and Innovation Center (ERIC); Director of the Center for Research Engagement (CRE); Associate Cancer Center Director for Community Outreach and Engagement at Yale Cancer Center; Chief Health Equity Officer at Smilow Cancer Hospital; Deputy Director for Health Equity Research and Workforce Development at the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation; Core Faculty in the National Clinician Scholars Program; Research Faculty in the Global Health Leadership Initiative; Director of the Pozen-Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in Health Equity Leadership; and Co-Director of the Doris Duke Clinical Research Fellowship. Dr. Nunez-Smith’s research focuses on promoting health and healthcare equity for structurally marginalized populations with an emphasis on centering community engagement, supporting healthcare workforce diversity and development, developing patient reported measurements of healthcare quality, and identifying regional strategies to reduce the global burden of non-communicable diseases. Dr. Nunez-Smith has extensive expertise in examining the effects of social and structural determinants of health, systemic influences contributing to health disparities, health equity improvement, and community-academic partnered scholarship. In addition to primary data collection, management, and analysis, ERIC has institutional expertise in qualitative and mixed methods, population health, and medical informatics. Dr. Nunez-Smith is the principal investigator on many NIH and foundation-funded research projects, including an NIH-funded project to develop a tool to assess patient reported experiences of discrimination in healthcare. She has conducted an investigation of the promotion and retention of diversity in academic medical school faculty and has published numerous articles on the experiences of minority students and faculty. Funded by NIH/NIMHD, she established the Eastern Caribbean Health Outcomes Research Network (ECHORN), a research collaborative across four Eastern Caribbean islands, supporting several chronic disease research projects and enhancing health outcomes research and leadership capacity in the region; the flagship ECHORN Cohort Study recruited and is following a community-dwelling adult cohort (n=3000) to examine novel chronic disease risk and protective factors. She received NIH/NHLBI funding to build upon this work by recruiting children into an expanded intergenerational ECHORN cohort, inclusive of a biorepository. She is also PI on one of five NIH/NIMHD-funded Transdisciplinary Collaborative Centers on Health Disparities focused on Precision Medicine which leverages the ECHORN infrastructure to conduct collaborative research on hypertension and diabetes. Most recently, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shed national attention on the health and healthcare disparities of marginalized populations, she received NIH funding to leverage ECHORN to improve the COVID-19 testing cascade in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. Further, she was called upon to chair the Governor’s ReOpen CT Advisory Group Community Committee and was subsequently named co-chair of the Biden-Harris Transition COVID-19 Advisory Board. She served as Senior Advisor to the White House COVID-19 Response and Chair of the Presidential COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force at the Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Nunez-Smith has mentored dozens of trainees since completing fellowship and has received numerous awards for teaching and mentoring. An elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, Dr. Nunez-Smith is board certified in internal medicine, having completed residency training at Harvard University’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and fellowship at the Yale Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program, where she also received a Masters in Health Sciences. Originally from the US Virgin Islands, she attended Jefferson Medical College, where she was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society, and she earned a BA in Biological Anthropology and Psychology at Swarthmore College.

Nancy Redeker, RN, MSN, PhD, FAHA, FAAN is the Beatrice Renfield Term Professor of Nursing at Yale School of Nursing and holds an appointment in the Yale Department of Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine- Section of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine. Her research focuses on the contributions of sleep and sleep disorders to quality of life and functional outcomes among people with chronic conditions and the efficacy and effectiveness of behavioral interventions to improve sleep and sleep-related outcomes, as well as the use of behavioral sleep interventions to prevent chronic conditions. http://nursing.yale.edu/faculty-research/faculty-d...Dr Redeker's publications are listed here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/myncbi/1Lc77IkK...She is Editor-in-Chief of the Heart & Lung, The Journal of Cardiopulmonary Care