Program Leadership

Dr. Cavazos will serve as the Co-Director for the LEAD Training Program. Her extensive research support, publication record, and long-standing dedication to the field of health disparities research makes her well qualified for this position. Dr. Cavazos is a Professor (with tenure) at Washington University School of Medicine (WUSM) and she is currently the Director of the Mentored Training Program in Clinical Investigation (MTPCI) at WUSM. MTPCI promotes the career development of junior faculty and postdoctoral fellows who have committed their careers to academic medicine by training them become clinical and translational researchers. She is also an alumna of the Professional Mentoring Skills Enhancing Diversity (PROMISED) training program through the University of Pittsburgh that places special emphasis on how to more effectively mentor scientists who belong to underrepresented groups. Dr. Cavazos is a member of an underrepresented minority group (Hispanic/Latina), and understands the importance of enhancing diversity in the workforce. She has served as a mentor to junior researchers from numerous internship programs, including the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Summer Research Program, the Young Scientist Program at WU, the Leadership Alliance Program at WU, the University of Missouri at St. Louis Student and Teachers as Research Scientists program, the Public Health Advanced Summer Education (PHASE) program, and the Summer Program for Research in Global Health (SPRINGH) at WU. Since 2007, Dr. Cavazos has been the course master for the Foundations of Health Care Research, which is a core course in the Master’s Program in Applied Health Behavior Research (AHBR) at WUSM. She has also been the course master of Health Disparities: Applications in Clinical Settings (a course she developed) and Counseling Skills for Healthcare Professionals, two courses in the Master’s Program in AHBR at University College Washington University in St. Louis. In 2014 and 2018, Dr. Cavazos was voted the “Course Master of the Year” by students in the AHBR program. Dr. Cavazos’ research has consistently been NIH-funded for 15 years since the start of her own postdoctoral fellowship. She leads the Investigators Connecting Health and Social Media (iCHASM) research lab at WUSM. This lab focuses on health policy and social media impact health risk behaviors, with a specific focus on adolescents. Her team has published several studies relating to mental health, health policy, and social media.

Dr. Ssewamala is the William E. Gordon Distinguished Professor of Social Work and Public Health at Brown School, and Professor of Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine. He is also the Founding Director of the International Center for Child Health and Development (ICHAD) and the Director of the SMART Africa Center. Although trained in the U.S., since obtaining his PhD fifteen years ago (2003), Dr. Ssewamala has concentrated his research on low resource communities in the U.S. and sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), characterized with health disparities. In SSA—a region heavily affected by poor health outcomes, including poor physical and mental health, impacting millions of children and young people, Dr. Ssewamala and Colleagues have conducted over fifteen years of intervention research in the region, funded primarily through NIH (NIMH, NICHD and NCI), testing and implementing interventions aimed at increasing life options and positive development opportunities for children, adolescents and families impacted by disease (HIV/AIDS), civil unrest and poverty. This work has established a strong foundation of stakeholders (including health clinics, public schools, government agencies and NGOs) in SSA region capable of implementing intervention research, and committed to addressing health disparities and the well-being of and future opportunities for vulnerable young people and their families. To date, Dr. Ssewamala has published over 80 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters focused on economic, education and health disparities research among children, adolescents and their caregiving families in communities affected by civil unrest and poverty—the same countries that will be offering training opportunities to selected LEAD Trainees. In addition to his extensive research experience conducting randomized control trials on child and adolescent behavioral and mental health, Dr. Ssewamala has mentored numerous graduate students, postgraduate fellows, and junior faculty members. While on faculty at Columbia University in New York (2003-2017), Dr. Ssewamala served as a Faculty Advisor to SOROS/OSI fellows attending U.S. institutions from the former Soviet Union countries.  He was also the Coordinator of the Dual Degree graduate level program in Social Work and International Affairs at Columbia University attracting graduate-level students from across the global, including SSA.  At Washington University, Dr. Ssewamala directs the SMART Africa Global Child Health Fellowship Program that currently has nine PhD-students and Junior faculty level fellows concentrating their research training on child and adolescent health in SSA; and he is one of the co-Directors of the recently NIMH funded Researcher Resilience Training focused on child behavioral health in low-resource communities, primarily in the United States.