Maura Kepper, Ph.D.

Dr. Kepper is an Assistant Professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to joining Washington University, Dr. Kepper completed postdoctoral training at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she was funded by a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. She received her doctorate degree in Public Health from Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center. Dr. Kepper is a member the Delta Omega Honorary Society in Public Health. As a member of the Prevention Research Center, Dr. Kepper conducts research to reduce the burden of the social, economic, and environmental conditions that shape the health of individuals and communities. Her research demonstrates the importance of, and interplay between, the social and physical environments on parenting practices, health behaviors (physical activity and diet), and obesity-related outcomes in youth. Her goal is to design, disseminate, and sustain interventions that overcome community-level barriers to reduce health disparities in chronic diseases such as, obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

Her work for the MTIS program aims to test her novel, EHR-based tool (PREVENT) that provides tailored, evidence-based behavior change recommendations inclusive of community-level resources at the point-of-care to help patients and their families overcome environmental barriers to improve cardiovascular health. The goal is to speed the translation of this tool into practice by simultaneously collecting mixed method data regarding determinants of current and future implementation of the PREVENT tool, guided by the new Reach, Efficacy, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance (RE-AIM) framework. This research will lead to a pragmatic, equitable approach to prevention that will be further tested using a cluster randomized hybrid trial in multiple clinics.