Linda Ganzini, MD, MPH
Principal Investigator
Linda.Ganzini@va.gov
Dr. Ganzini is Principal Investigator of the HSR&D Research Enhancement Award Program at the Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center (PVAMC) where she is also Director of the Interprofessional Palliative Care Fellowship. She is a Professor of Psychiatry and Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) where she is also Director of the Geropsychiatry Fellowship Program and a Senior Scholar at the Center on Ethics in Health Care. She completed her psychiatry training at OHSU, her geriatric medicine fellowship training at PVAMC, and received a Masters of Public Health with emphasis in epidemiology and biostatistics from OHSU in 2003. Dr. Ganzini was a Project on Death in America Faculty Scholar. She has active research grants from the VA and from private foundations, with ongoing studies to examine the prevalence of mental disorders in hospice patients, and a randomized trial of methylphenidate for depressed cancer patients in hospice. Other active research includes a longitudinal study of interest in assisted suicide among cancer patients, and studies of family members` views when loved ones request assisted suicide. She received a VA New Clinical Initiative grant to form the PVAMC palliative care consultation team and examine its outcomes. Her research on the Oregon Death with Dignity Act has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association.
David Hickam, MD, MPH
Co-Principal Investigator
David.Hickam@va.gov
Dr. Hickam is a general internist who teaches medical students and
residents on the inpatient medicine service at the PVAMC.
He also directs the PVAMC’s medical informatics fellowship.
He is a Professor in the OHSU Department of Medicine and has joint faculty
appointments there in the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology
and in the Department of Public Health & Preventive Medicine.
His research has focused on information exchange between providers and patients
and on factors associated with practice variation in VA primary care settings.
Dr. Hickam is Director of the John M. Eisenberg Center at OHSU, which is funded by the
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to develop evidence-based tools to enhance decision
making by patients, clinicians, and policymakers. He also is a core investigator of the
VA’s Consortium on Health Informatics Research and leads a project examining the clinical
vocabulary used by clinicians who care for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Dr. Hickam received his MD degree from the University of California San Francisco and
completed residency and fellowship training in internal medicine at Stanford University.
He received his MPH degree from the University of California Berkeley.
Steven Dobscha, MD
Advanced Research Career Development Awardee
Steven.Dobscha@va.gov
Dr. Dobscha is Staff Psychiatrist at the PVAMC, Core Investigator of the Portland Center for the Study of Chronic Comorbid Mental and Physical Disorders, and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at OHSU. He is currently a VA HSR&D Career Development Awardee. He attended Yale Medical School, and completed his residency at UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. He has worked in a number of primary care settings providing psychiatric consultation and developing consultation programs over the past 16 years. His research interests include approaches to integrating psychiatric and primary medical care, managing chronic conditions in primary care, and end-of-life care. He recently completed a randomized clinical trial of a low-intensity care management approach for depression in primary care, and is currently principal investigator of a randomized clinical trial of a collaborative approach to chronic pain.
Martha Gerrity, MD, MPH, PhD
Core Investigator
Martha.Gerrity@va.gov
Dr. Gerrity is a general internist and Professor of Internal Medicine at OHSU. She completed a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars program in Chapel Hill in 1987, Masters of Public Health in Epidemiology in 1988, and Doctorate in Education in 1993. She has significant experience in curriculum development and evaluation including faculty development coordinator and evaluation specialist for the School of Medicine’s new curriculum in the early 1990s, evaluation consultant for a NIH R25 grant to incorporate complimentary and alternative medicine into the medical school curriculum, and evaluation of a program to educate practitioners about depression. Her research focuses on medical education, measurement and survey research, physician job satisfaction, and improving outcomes of chronic medical conditions. She is a member of the Mental Health QUERI executive committee participating in projects to broadly disseminate programs to improve depression care throughout VHA including rural sites. Besides workshops on medical education, her educational activities include teaching and evaluating evidence-based medicine (EBM) skills. Dr. Gerrity has served as faculty for many national and international workshops on EBM and has served as the Chairperson of the Society of General Medicine’s Evidence-Based Medicine Task Force from 1999 - 2002. In 2004, she and William Tierney, MD became Co-Editors of the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
Elizabeth Goy, PhD
Research Career Development Awardee
Elizabeth.Goy@va.gov
Dr. Goy graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology.
Her Master’s and Doctorate degrees in Clinical Psychology were
awarded by Northern Illinois University in 1999.
She joined the PVAMC in 1998 as an
Intern in Clinical Psychology, and completed a Postdoctoral
Fellowship at the PVAMC in Geropsychology.
She is an assistant professor in the
OHSU School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry,
and directs the Psychology Postdoctoral Fellowship in Palliative Care at PVAMC.
Dr. Goy’s research, supported by an HSR&D Career Development Award, focuses on improving mental
health care for neurological disorders, describing unmet needs and identifying interventions to
improve care for the end-of-life trajectory of Parkinson Disease (PD).
She has also created a specialty clinic in Mental Health at PVAMC serving patients
with PD and their family caregivers for: evaluation and treatment of depression,
apathy, and caregiver strain; coping with prognosis; and cognitive/mood screening for
deep brain stimulation candidates.
Mark Helfand, MD, MPH, MS
Core Investigator
Mark.Helfand@va.gov
Dr. Helfand is a Staff Physician at the Portland VA Medical Center and Professor of Medicine and Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). He earned Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of English Literature degrees from Stanford University, a medical degree from the University of Illinois, and completed post-graduate training in internal medicine at Stanford Medical School. He joined the Portland VA in 1990. He was a Robert Wood Johnson Generalist Faculty Scholar from 1993-1997 and has been Director of the Oregon Evidence-based Practice Center from 1997 to the present. He has been Editor-in-Chief of the journal Medical Decision Making since 2005.
Dr. Helfand’s research focuses on the use of systematic reviews to inform clinical and public policy. His current projects include the VA’s Evidence-based Synthesis Program and he directs the Scientific Resource Center for AHRQ’s Effective Health Care program.
Linda Humphrey, MD, MPH
Core Investigator
Linda.Humphrey@va.gov
Dr. Humphrey is a Staff Physician at the Portland VA Medical Center and Associate Professor of Medicine,
Public Health & Preventive Medicine, and Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology at OHSU.
She received her undergraduate degree in General Science and Nutrition at Oregon State University
and her medical degree at OHSU. Her postgraduate training in internal medicine was at OHSU,
followed by fellowship training in General Medicine at the Mayo Clinic. She also received
training in Preventive Medicine and Public Health at the Mayo Clinic and the University of Minnesota.
She is board certified in both Internal Medicine and Public Health and Preventive Medicine.
She has been on the faculty at OHSU and PVAMC since 1989. Her research has been largely
in the areas of chronic disease epidemiology and clinical preventive medicine, with a strong focus on
women’s health and cancer screening.
Diana Pope, PhD, RN
Core Investigator
Diana.Pope@va.gov
Dr. Pope is Acting Director of Nursing Research at the PVAMC.
She obtained a diploma in Nursing from the Bryn Mawr Hospital School of Nursing, and a BS in Nursing in 1990
from the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, permitting a transition from acute care to community health practice.
Obtaining an MS degree from the University of Maryland in Community Health Intercultural Nursing,
she began a 12-year career in Tuberculosis control and research, initially, by supervising the nurse-run
TB Clinic for the Baltimore City Health Department, collaborating with researchers from Johns Hopkins in
DNA fingerprinting studies, and later, as a PhD candidate, functioning as TB consultant, and research nurse
on a variety of TB-related projects and studies. Employed at the Johns Hopkins Center for Tuberculosis
Research from 1999 to 2006, she was the Project Director for an international research consortium
(Consortium to Respond Effectively to the AIDS-TB Epidemic – CREATE) funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation with the mission to reduce tuberculosis, using existing technology, in communities with high
HIV prevalence. She received her PhD from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in
Infectious Disease Epidemiology. Dr. Pope joined the VA in 2007 as an epidemiologist. Dr. Pope’s research focuses on the effects of hospital noise on
speech intelligibility as experienced by
hospitalized patients in acoustic environments like that of typical nursing units.
Her research is supported by funding from VA HSR&D Nursing Research Initiative.
Somnath Saha, MD, MPH
Advanced Research Career Development Awardee
Somnath.Saha@va.gov
Dr. Saha is Staff Physician at the PVAMC and Associate Professor of Medicine,
Public Health & Preventive Medicine, and Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology at
OHSU. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Stanford University and received his medical degree
and post-graduate training in Internal Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
He was a VA fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at the University of Washington,
where he obtained a masters degree in public health. He joined the VA in 1996 and began his current position
at the PVAMC in 1999.
Dr. Saha’s research focuses on the influence of race and ethnicity in the patient-physician relationship,
and its relation to racial disparities in the quality of health care. His current projects involve
investigating the role of specific racial barriers in patient-physician relationships, the extent to which
these barriers explain racial differences in the quality of care, and the role of physicians’ “cultural competence”
in mitigating these barriers. This work is supported by grants from VA HSR&D, NIH, and AHRQ.
Kathryn Corson, PhD
Affiliate Investigator
Kathryn.Corson@va.gov
Jonathan Duckart, MPS
Data Analyst
Jonathan.Duckart@va.gov
Richard Harper, MD
Affiliate Investigator
Richard.Harper@va.gov
Michael Lasarev, MS
Statistician
lasarevm@ohsu.edu
Eun Sul Lee, PhD
Statistician
Eun.Lee2@va.gov
David Lieberman, MD
Affiliate Investigator
David.Lieberman@va.gov
Nancy Press, PhD
Medical Anthropologist
pressn@ohsu.edu
Rajiv Sharma, PhD
Health Economist
crsr@pdx.edu
Robert Socherman, PhD
Clinical Psychologist
Robert.Socherman@va.gov
Melinda Leng, BS
Network Manager
Melinda.Leng@va.gov
Sondra Long, BA
Administrative Officer
Sondra.Long@va.gov
