Directory

Sarah Leslie joined CEPEG in 2019 as the Survey Operations Manager. Sarah received her MPH from the Colorado School of Public Health in 2014, and her BS in Biological Anthropology from the University of Maryland. Sarah previously served as a senior research associate and project manager at Denver Health. Her personal and professional interests include work in women’s health, health promotion, and health systems inequalities. In her spare time she enjoys backpacking, gardening, skiing, reading, and making pasta necklaces.

Dr. Levine is a faculty associate at the CU Center for Bioethics and Humanities and a past chair of the AMA Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs. He has served as the Denver region's chief medical officer for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. He is actively involved in programs to improve population health through access to services that address social needs.

Dr. Levinson is a professor of community and behavioral health and a member of the University of Colorado Cancer Center, with more than 25 years of experience in public health practice and research. His interests include identifying, understanding, and reducing disparities in tobacco-related risks and behaviors among cultural minorities and people with lower socioeconomic status (SES). He also studies methods for detecting violation rates in retail tobacco sales to underage customers. His research has shown that three-fourths of current U.S. smokers have low-SES; Colorado adults with disabilities have severely elevated smoking prevalence; college students who smoke are likely to deny being smokers; that Colorado Latinx adults have higher smoking prevalence than non-Hispanic white adults, a U.S. anomaly; and federal protocols for monitoring underage tobacco sales grossly underestimate violation rates while effective protocols are feasible and practical. His findings led Colorado to prioritize tobacco programming to reach Latinx, disabled, and low-SES smokers, and were used in designing Colorado’s tobacco sales-license law enacted in 2020. Dr. Levinson has represented the University of Colorado Cancer Center on the Guidelines Panel for Smoking Cessation of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, and served six years as chair/vice chair of the Colorado Tobacco Grants Review Committee.

Dr. Li is the principal statistical analyst for The Attitudes and Behaviors Survey (TABS) on Health, a population-based, repeat cross-sectional study for the State of Colorado tobacco control program. Li has a strong background in survey design and analysis: he has over 12 years of experience managing complex survey data and is a graduate of the Summer Institute in Survey Research Techniques at the University of Michigan and a fellow in the Sampling Program for Survey Statisticians. His areas of expertise include categorical data analysis, longitudinal data analysis, population-level survey sampling and complex weighting, survival and event history analysis, statistical genetics, clinical trials, and complex survey sampling and survey design.

In addition to his key role on the TABS surveillance survey, Li is the primary statistician for CEPEG’s research and evaluation survey work including TABS-Influential Factors in Healthy Living, Colorado Health Exposures and Smoking Survey, Colorado Media and Marijuana Survey, and Boulder, CO Sugar Sweetened Beverage Policy Evaluation, and he works in close collaboration with the Health Kids Colorado Survey analytic team. Dr. Li also oversees data management best practices for CEPEG’s survey research efforts. 

He has participated in the Improving Health Care Delivery Data Project—a data infrastructure development and comparative effectiveness research study of health care delivery systems for American Indian and Alaska Natives, and in the evaluation of the effect of the Allies Against Asthma intervention program. 

Li earned an MPH degree in Biostatistics from the University of Michigan School of Public Health and a PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai.

Richard C. Lindrooth, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Health Systems, Management and Policy in the Colorado School of Public Health at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. He is also a co-director of the department's Health Service Research PhD program. He teaches graduate-level Health Care Financial Management and Health Services Research Methods.  

Dr. Lindrooth's research has primarily been focused on three topical areas: the economics of the hospital industry, mental health services research, and health policy. His ongoing research is focused on understanding the role that management practices play in determining differences in the quality of care and treatment decisions in cardiac care units. He recently started a project funded by the NIH Common Fund focused on understanding the differences in outcomes and cost between a system using global bundled payments and one that uses fee-for-service and primary care capitated payments in Medicaid Accountable Care Organizations. Dr. Lindrooth has been PI on several R01 grants funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. He has also been PI on projects funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Berlex Laboratories. 

Dr. Lindrooth was awarded the Charles E. Gibbs Leadership Prize in 2007 for his joint research with Dr. Jeffrey McCullough on Medicaid women's health policy. He received his PhD and MA in Economics from the University of Washington and a BA in Economics from the University of Vermont. 

Kira Litvin is the continuing education coordinator providing project management, instructional design, administrative support and outreach on behalf of the Center for Health, Work & Environment's continuing education program. She has a background in teaching English as a second language and information literacy in higher education. Prior to joining the Center, Kira was an academic librarian developing research instructional learning materials and managing online library systems.

Ming Ma is a Research Instructor in the Department of Community and Behavioral Health in the Colorado School of Public Health. She earned an MD degree in 2007 and an MPH with a concentration of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics in 2014. She primarily works as data analyst for Health Kids Colorado Survey which is the state’s comprehensive survey on the health and well-being of young people. Her statistical skills includes complex survey data analysis using non-random sampling and multi-stage sampling. She also has expertise in large dataset management and reporting. Her other statistical experience includes multivariate linear and nonlinear modeling, longitudinal data analysis, zero-inflated models, etc. She teaches the Intro level Biostatistics and also Data Analysis Using SAS in the summer and fall semesters. She grew up in a cold northeast city in China. In her spare time, she enjoys watching movie, ice skating, and spending time with her middle school kiddo and other friends.

Sheryl's primary research focus is understanding the relative contribution of social factors and environmental exposures on chronic disease. She has worked extensively in the elementary school setting on developing surveillance methods and educational programs for childhood asthma, understanding the role of lead exposure in educational outcomes, and analyzing the role of social culture and indoor environmental quality and the health and performance of students and teachers. She has active collaborations with exposure scientists to develop refined exposure assessment models in community and agricultural settings in studies of childhood and occupational respiratory disease. Her current methodological work focuses on application of novel approaches to understand environmental pollutant mixtures in community-based studies. Sheryl is the epidemiology concentration lead at the ColoradoSPH at CSU.

Spero M. Manson, PhD (Pembina Chippewa) is a distinguished professor of public health and psychiatry, directs the Centers for American Indian & Alaska Native Health, and occupies the Colorado Trust Chair in American Indian Health within the Colorado School of Public Health at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. A medical anthropologist, he completed his training at the University of Minnesota (1980) and a psychiatric internship at the Oregon Health Sciences University. His programs include 10 national centers, which pursue research, program development, training, and collaboration with 250 Native communities, spanning rural, reservation, urban, and village settings across the country. Dr. Manson has acquired over $200 million in sponsored research to support this work and published 280 articles and book chapters on the assessment, epidemiology, treatment, and prevention of physical, alcohol, drug, as well as mental health problems over the developmental life span of Native people. Dr. Manson is widely acknowledged as one of the nation’s leading authorities in regard to Indian and Native health.

Dr. Jennifer Martin was born and raised in a small agricultural community in Central Texas. Despite early aspirations to be the first female President, it wasn’t until a chance experience with a problematic Hampshire barrow that Jennifer chose to pursue a degree in Animal Science from Texas Tech University.

Jennifer’s graduate experience at Texas Tech allowed her to pursue a variety of research interests in the areas of meat safety, shelf-life, nutrition, and quality. These research experiences have led to numerous publications, industry partnerships, academic collaborations, and a uniquely diverse skill set. Furthermore, as a graduate student, Jennifer helped instruct her department’s Anatomy course and had the unique opportunity to serve as the laboratory instructor/coordinator for the same undergraduate meat science course which elicited her own passion for the field. This experience fueled Jennifer’s passion for teaching and engaging other students.

As a faculty member at CSU, Dr. Martin’s research interests lie in a systems-based approach to meat safety and quality. She intends to explore the complex, interwoven, and ever-evolving pathways that influence the production of safe, sustainable, and high quality meat. Additionally, as a passionate educator, Jennifer plans to serve the department and its students by leading and teaching with not only a purpose, but also a passion.

Dr. McKenzie’s research has contributed to the understanding of how air pollutants and other exposures resulting from the unconventional development of petroleum resources may affect the public’s health. Her studies investigating associations between adverse birth outcomes and childhood cancers and proximity to oil and gas development are among the first epidemiological studies on this topic to appear in the published literature. Her sentinel human health risk assessment indicated the potential for respiratory, neurological, and developmental health outcomes resulting from exposure to air pollutants emitted during natural gas development. She has testified before the United States Congress and the Denver Metropolitan Regional Air Quality Council on the public health implications of natural gas development.

As a pediatric physical therapist with doctoral training in Developmental Epidemiology, Dr. McManus’s research focuses on population-based health interventions for young children with developmental delays and disabilities. She is particularly interested in access to, utilization, effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness of health and therapeutic services for medically fragile infants. Dr. McManus employs a variety of quantitative methods, including multi-level statistical modeling, longitudinal analyses and structural equation modeling using large secondary data sets.

Lisa Miller, MD, MSPH is a Professor of Epidemiology, the Director of the Preventive Medicine Residency Program, and Associate Dean for Public Health Practice at the Colorado School of Public Health. Prior to coming to the University in May 2017, she was Chief of the Communicable Disease Branch and the State Epidemiologist at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. In this role she oversaw communicable disease surveillance and control activities for the State. She has over 22 years of experience implementing and overseeing public health programs, and has been principal investigator on multiple Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grants/cooperative agreements in the areas of birth defects surveillance, autism surveillance and research, muscular dystrophy surveillance and research, occupational health surveillance, environmental health surveillance, and infectious disease surveillance and research.