Community Engagement & Advocacy (StAT)
The goal of the Community Engagement and Advocacy (StAT) Scholarly Concentration is to promote child health and reduce child health disparities though engagement in community-based or legislative advocacy projects in collaboration with local, state and/or national partners.
The StAT program provides residents with specialized advocacy training and the opportunity to develop individual advocacy projects with the support of faculty mentors from the Office of Child Health Equity.
Contact Information
Lisa Chamberlain, MD, MPH
Lisa Chamberlain, MD, MPH is known for her work in pediatric health inequities, focusing on the non-clinical factors that contribute to health disparities, particularly in California. More She is nationally known for her work in community pediatrics and child health advocacy, with two national awards for her work in these areas. Her recent research endeavors are tightly policy-focused: she is currently exploring the variation in access to hospital based pediatric care for children with chronic illness in California, utilizing the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) private dataset. Her recent collaboration with Dr. Huffman, in which she examined the impact of managed care on children with special healthcare needs, resulted in a publication that was used extensively in Sacramento as the state drafted a 1115 waiver to overhaul child health delivery for the state’s most vulnerable child populations. In addition to her health services research, she builds and evaluates community-campus partnerships to reduce health inequities locally.
Janine Bruce, DrPH
Janine Bruce, DrPH Janine Bruce received her Bachelor of Arts in Biology from Occidental College. After graduation she spent two years in Kyrgyzstan as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching ecology and English to secondary school students. More Upon returning to the US, she received her MPH in Maternal and Child Health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2002. She returned to California and began working with the Pediatric Advocacy Program. Janine received her Doctorate of Public Health at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health in 2013. Her research interests included the reproductive health of foster care youth and vulnerable youth populations. With her background in public health, Janine’s role has been to bridge public health and medicine to better promote the health of underserved child populations through strong community partnerships and innovative community-based initiatives. She also teaches courses across the undergraduate campus and medical school on community engagement and qualitative methods.
Bonnie Halpern-Felsher, PhD
Dr. Bonnie Halpern-Felsher is the Marron and Mary Elizabeth Kendrick Professor in Pediatrics II in the Division of Adolescent Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, Stanford University. She holds courtesy appointments in Epidemiology & Population Health and Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences. More She is also the Director of Fellows’ Scholarship and Co-leader of one of the residency scholarly concentrations in the Department of Pediatrics, and Director of Research in Adolescent Medicine. She is also director of the REACH Lab.
Dr. Halpern-Felsher is a developmental psychologist with additional training in adolescent and young adult health. Funded by the NIH and many foundations, her research has focused on understanding and reducing adolescent and young adult tobacco use, alcohol and marijuana use, and risky sexual behavior. Her research, including about 200 publications in journals such as JAMA Network, Pediatrics, and the American Journal of Public Health, as well as her committee and policy work, have been instrumental in setting policy at the local, state, and national level. She has served as a consultant to a number of community-based adolescent health promotion programs and has been an active member on several national campaigns to understand and reduce adolescent tobacco/e-cigarette use. She has testified in several states and at the FDA arguing for more tobacco/e-cigarette regulation, served on six Institute of Medicine/National Academies of Medicine committees, and contributed to three Surgeon General Reports, all focused on reducing adolescent risk behavior and promoting health. Dr. Halpern-Felsher also translates her research findings into adolescent prevention programs, such as three programs in which she is the founder and executive director: Tobacco Prevention Toolkit, the Cannabis Awareness and Prevention Toolkit, and the Vaping Information, Solutions, and Interventions Toolkit. These internationally recognized and used toolkits have reached over 3 million students. In addition to her scholarly work, Dr. Halpern-Felsher leads several programs and courses focused on teaching research, including leading the Department of Pediatrics’ fellowship research education academy and grant writing club, co-leading within the Department of Pediatrics’ residency scholarship programs, and being the instructor for Epi 244, focused on teaching survey development. Dr. Halpern-Felsher also developed and directs several mentoring programs for underrepresented youth, having mentored over 300 high school students over the past 20 years. In recognition of her research, advocacy and mentoring roles, Dr. Halpern-Felsher received the Department of Pediatrics’ Advocacy Award in 2019, the Postdoc Mentoring Award in 2019, and the Clinical Science Research Award in 2021.
Shazeen Suleman, MD, MPH
Co-Director of Community Engagement
Clinical Associate Professor, Pediatrics