Announcing Recipients of New HSR Staff and Investigator Special Recognition Awards

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July 29, 2024

Congratulations to the recipients and nominees of the HSR Staff and Investigator Special Recognition Awards for 2023! These awards, offered for the first time, recognize Health Systems Research (HSR) field-based staff and investigators who have made significant and longstanding contributions within the last 12 months in key roles or as specialists on research projects and/or within the research enterprise more broadly.

Nominees are required to be field-based staff or investigators whose funding for the previous 12 months came in whole or in part from HSR, the Quality Enhancement Research Initiative (QUERI), or operationally partnered research.

Staff Special Recognition Award Recipients

Jennifer Burns, MHSA, of HSR's Center for Clinical Management Research (CCMR) has served as data manager/analyst for hundreds of VA-funded projects, including the VINCI Data Manager Pilot Program and VA's Electronic Health Record Modernization (EHRM) initiative. She applies her deep expertise in data methods to develop training for new quantitative analysts, and to support quantitative analysts, project managers, and clinical investigators, ensuring the success of research projects and improving the overall research environment. She is committed to serving others-particularly Veterans-and fosters an environment of collaboration and knowledge sharing among colleagues.

Kelty Fehling, MPH, of HSR's Seattle-Denver Center of Innovation for Veteran-Centered and Value-Driven Care has made instrumental contributions through her leadership of the VA Collaborative Evaluation Center, which focuses on program evaluation as part of a learning health system. She has developed several local and national Veteran Engagement groups, and co-developed the Growing Rural Outreach through Veteran Engagement center as a resource for VA researchers who want to enhance rural Veteran Engagement. She has also coordinated a QUERI-funded evaluation to understand Veterans' opinions and perspectives on changes in pulmonary function test interpretation from race-stratified to "race-neutral" equations, which will have significant downstream implications for VA.

Co-recipients Carla Garcia, MPH, of HSR's Health Economics Resource Center (HERC) and Cindie Slightam, MPH, of HSR's Center for Innovation to Implementation (Ci2i) are founders and co-leads of a novel HSR Internship Program for community college students from historically excluded groups. Ms. Garcia and Ms. Slightam designed the internship to expose students to research, inspire and aid students' academic and professional careers, and provide an opportunity for students to envision themselves in research settings at VHA. The program was specifically and intentionally created to grow the pipeline of diverse candidates in VA research. The program supports not only students but also the success of VA research by promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion of the research workforce.

Melissa Knox, RD, of HSR's Houston Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness and Safety (IQuESt) has managed projects and operational partnerships that have generated scientific products of great value to VHA's Office of Nursing Services (ONS) amid nationwide nurse staffing shortages. Her work includes leading the development of electronic health record (EHR)-derived nursing workforce measures that served as the basis for an HSR-funded COVID rapid response project and an ONS-sponsored quality improvement project on applying novel EHR-derived staffing measures across VHA to support evaluation of nurse staffing methodology.

Jeffery Pitcock, MPH, of Behavioral Health QUERI (BHQ), provides data analytic support for projects focused on implementing and evaluating evidence-based practices to improve mental health and suicide prevention for Veterans. He has been instrumental in the completion of five Rapid Response Team projects-including Congressionally mandated work related to mental health and suicide prevention, and project evaluation of the Veterans Crisis Line. He serves as a subject matter expert on implementation measures and methods, is a founding member of the BHQ Stakeholder Council, and supports the ongoing evaluation of the BHQ Implementation Facilitation Learning Hub.

Investigator Special Recognition Award Recipients

Rendelle Bolton, PhD, MPH, of HSR's Center for Health Optimization and Implementation Research (CHOIR) has led multiple projects under QUERI's Center for Evaluating Patient Centered Care in VA (EPCC-VA). She has substantively impacted VA healthcare with work that includes contributing to implementation of lung cancer screening within VA and understanding the challenges to its coordination across systems, a high priority area for improvement in VA. Dr. Bolton's EPCC-VA work has informed operational decisions about how best to use resources and has enhanced understanding of how implementation strategies can facilitate health system transformation on a large scale. She established and continues to lead CHOIR's Qualitative Core, a center-wide effort that has developed infrastructure to address CHOIR's qualitative research needs, and she has led the evaluation of CHOIR's two DEI Summer Internship Programs.

Cynthia Coffman, PhD, of HSR's Durham Center of Innovation to Accelerate Discovery and Practice Transformation (ADAPT) has served as lead statistical investigator on numerous VA studies and as a member of NIH and VA Data Safety and Monitoring Boards, contributing her expertise to ensure the ethical conduct and safety of research trials. Her leadership and knowledge in research design and analytic methods for cluster-randomized trials, heterogeneity of treatment effects, and complicated longitudinal data are particularly valued. During 25 years of dedicated service to HSR, she has demonstrated an unparalleled commitment to excellence in team science and mentorship and has been instrumental in shaping the direction of ADAPT's research projects.

Scott Coggeshall, PhD, of HSR's Seattle-Denver Center of Innovation for Veteran-Centered and Value-Driven Care has provided outstanding support and guidance to numerous research projects and operations evaluation activities. He plays a critical role on many projects, including work that helped the Office of Patient Centered Care and Cultural Transformation evaluate the impact of Whole Health on opioid use and patient-reported outcomes. He has developed innovative ways to analyze patient-reported outcomes using longitudinal models, and he always strives to produce the most rigorous and robust findings.

Caroline Gray, PhD, of HSR's Center for Innovation to Implementation (Ci2i) has made longstanding and significant contributions to VA research as a co-investigator and methodologist on a range of studies. As the Qualitative Lead for Ci2i, she regularly provides consultation and mentoring to investigators, fellows, career development awardees, and staff. Due to her expert advice, Ci2i investigators now routinely include qualitative methods in their proposals and research. Dr. Gray's contributions consistently deepen the richness and rigor of how studies address key questions and improve the degree to which the work informs implementation of findings. She has played a key role in the success of many Ci2i projects via her contribution to the quality of the scientific methods and her dedication to the advancement of early career investigators.

Maria Mor, PhD, of HSR's Center for Health Equity Research & Promotion (CHERP) has served in multiple leadership, mentoring, co-investigator, service, and educational roles. She has supported the professional development of early career investigators, contributed to the rigor of multidisciplinary research, and developed an impressive quantitative research infrastructure, with contributions to research design and analytical expertise on projects that include improving MRSA screening for hospitalized Veterans, reducing severe hypertension in Black Veterans, and improving administrative methods for using race and ethnicity data for enrolled Veterans. The quantitative methods collaboratory that she developed, in which data scientists are integral members of multidisciplinary research teams, serves as a paradigm for team-based, big-data science on a national level.

Laura Myers, PhD, of HSR's Center for Health Information and Communication (CHIC) is a key contributor through her extensive knowledge and skills in how to capture, manage, and analyze VA data. Without her work as Senior Data Scientist, the vast portfolio of CHIC would not be possible. Similarly, her expertise with multiple VA datasets is an essential component of CHIC's QUERI evaluation of real-world implementation efforts and other operational projects. Her ability to quickly capture and code variables of interest, such as the validity of COVID-19 testing, has helped operational leaders make sense of significant variability in facility-level outcomes, and her data science expertise has been invaluable in several recent studies that have resulted in high-impact publications.

Rebecca Raciborski, PhD, of HSR's Center for Mental Healthcare and Outcomes Research (CeMHOR) is a national leader in economic analyses. As the Core Lead of the CeMHOR Methods Core, which aims to boost productivity and increase methodological rigor by providing methods education and consultation to investigators affiliated with CeMHOR, Dr. Raciborski is dedicated to disseminating knowledge of best practices and improving research processes to maximize efficiency. She is highly sought after for consultation across VA as evidenced by her work on HSR, QUERI, and operations projects, and she has significantly contributed to the professional development of early career investigators at CeMHOR and in VA nationally. Her colleagues note her emphasis on active development and mentorship of new researchers and staff from diverse backgrounds and her interest in justice-informed methods to improve generalizability of research findings for all Veterans.

HSR also thanks the Special Recognition Award nominees for their important work and contributions to the field of health systems research!

HSR Staff Special Recognition Award nominees

Nominees	Location
Kelly Burkitt, PhD	Pittsburgh, PA
Ryann Engle, MPH	Boston, MA
Raymond Facundo, MSW	Denver, CO
Courtni France, MA	Durham, NC
Taigy Gooding, DrPH	Los Angeles, CA
Sarah Shull, PhD	Portland, OR
Kenda Steffensmeier, PhD	Iowa City, IA
Erica Tartaglione, BS	Seattle, WA
Marissa Wirth, MPH	Hines, IL

HSR Investigator Special Recognition Award nominees

Nominees	Location
Elizabeth Hooker, MS, MPH, CPH	Portland, OR
Marlena Shin, JD, MPH	Boston, MA

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