Sabra F. Woolley, PhD
Program Director
Sabra Woolley is Program Director in the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch at the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health. She is a medical anthropologist whose interests are focused on the cultural component of health seeking behaviors among diverse ethnic groups in the United States, as well as upon the study of biomedical practitioners as a cultural subgroup. She manages a series of grants that include community and clinic based interventions for cancer prevention and control in diverse populations, health literacy, and health disparities.
She was trained at the University of Arizona where she received her BA, MA and Ph.D. in cultural anthropology. After teaching at the University of Hawaii for a number of years, she relocated to Washington D.C. and began a career as a practicing anthropologist. This included a series of widely diverse jobs, including work with the Army and Navy, developing and evaluating family support programs, and compiling Research Road Maps for their civilian personnel, with the National Institute of Mental Health, and with the sociobehavioral component of the DOD Breast Cancer Research Project. As a Senior Researcher at the George Washington University Medical Center, she conducted a number of program evaluations, and studied the interrelationship between managed care organizations and the issues of cultural competency, their relationship with public health organizations and the delivery of services for tuberculosis.
She now manages a portfolio of research grants and does a great deal of technical assistance to grantees prior to the submission of their grants in the behavioral research area at NCI. She sits on a number of committees, primarily those which deal with health literacy and health disparities issues. She has completed a monograph on Qualitative Research Grants for NIH. She offers a series of grant writing workshops for new investigators, in both an on-line as well as in person environment. |
