Current research projects
“Matchmaking for health: Facilitating mentoring in peer health communities through social matching”
- a 3-year NSF grant that facilitates patient expertise sharing within CancerConnect.com. I Co-PI this grant with Drs. Wanda Pratt and David McDonald of UW iSchool.“Understanding and promoting health literacy through a quality of life dashboard of prostate cancer symptoms following treatment” - a 2-year NCI R03 grant to develop and test graphical quality of life dashboards through user-centered collaboration with patients and clinicians. I Co-PI this grant with Dr. John Gore of UW Department of Urology in the School of Medicine.
"My46 personal genome portal" - a web-based tool for personalizing the return of whole genome sequences to individuals. As a research scientist, I am working with Geneticists, Bioethics researchers, and Informatics specialists to help design, develop, and test this portal.
"OpenELIS Global"-an open source lab information system being implemented in partnership with International Training and Education Center for Health (I-TECH). I am working with public health professionals, local stakeholders, and ifnroamtics specialists to gather requirements and implement OpenELIS in Haiti and Cote D'Ivoire.
Dissertation thesis
Patients can gain significant insights for managing their personal health from others who have faced similar health situations. In my disseration thesis, "Understanding and Facilitating Patient Expertise Sharing"
I characterized patients' experiential expertise about managing the cancer experience, described the practices patients use to locate peers for support, and collaborated with patients in the user-centered design of a people finder for online health communities that recommends peers with matching interests.
Past research projects
Managing health in your life
The long-term objective of this research is both to understand patients' information management work and to develop new technology that will support that work. Under the direction of Wanda Pratt I am taking part in this research though field studies, surveys, and design groups with individuals touched by the breast cancer experience.Change of heart
The goal of this work is to facilitate heart-healthy lifestyle through innovative technology. Under the direction of Wanda Pratt, I am taking part in this research thorough focus groups, field studies, and surveys with individuals who are managing heart disease.Keeping found things found
This project combines fieldwork with selective prototyping in an effort to understand and support personal information management. My primary work on this project compared the use of folders and tags as methods for organizing personal information. I completed this work under the direction of William Jones and Harry Bruce.Decision Theory in Radiation Oncology
The goal of this project is to enhance the decision-making process for prostate intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) plans by incorporating the decision-theoretic concept of influence diagrams. In my work on this project, I investigated the use of multi-attribute utility theory to incorporate patient preferences into IMRT planning decisions for prostate cancer. I worked under the direction of Mark Phillips and Jason Doctor.Graphic presentation of health risk information
The goal of this project was to investigate the effect of presentation format of health risk information on behavior of health consumers,including risk comprehension, expected utility violations, risk perception, and behavioral modification. My work spanned a systematic review of risk format effects in the health consumer population to a survey comparing expected utility violations across various probability formats. I worked with Fredric Wolf and Jason Doctor.
