Meet the WELL Thailand Stanford Team

Catherine Heaney, PhD, MPH

Catherine A. Heaney, PhD, MPH, is an associate professor (teaching) in the Stanford Prevention Research Center, the Department of Psychology, and the interdisciplinary Program in Human Biology. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and her MPH and PhD in health behavior and health education from the University of Michigan School of Public Health .

Dr. Heaney’s primary research focus is work and health. As a social scientist, her research activities have been directed at broadening the scope of occupational safety and health research to address not only physical and chemical hazards, but also psychological and social stressors experienced at work. Toward this aim, she has served on the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health Board of Scientific Counselors and contributed to the National Occupational Research Agenda.

Dr. Heaney has studied the social, psychological and physiological mechanisms through which psychosocial stress at work influences an employee’s health in various industries and occupational sectors including health and human services, manufacturing, and agriculture. She works collaboratively with worksites and communities to develop and evaluate intervention strategies for restructuring physical, organizational and social aspects of work to reduce sources of stress, build social support, enhance perceived control of work tasks, strengthen employee coping skills, improve employee health behaviors, and thereby promote workers’ health.

At Stanford, Dr. Heaney has introduced hundreds of students to the joys and challenges of community-based public health research and the benefits of preventive intervention.

Patricia Rodriguez Espinosa PhD, MPH 

Patricia, a native of Habana, Cuba, earned her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology in 2018 and a Master of Public Health (Health Policy concentration) in 2017, both from the University of New Mexico. Her graduate research work concentrated on health equity, racial residential segregation and the science of Community-Based Participatory Research. She is currently a research fellow with the Stanford Prevention Research Center. She is currently working with WELL analyzing both qualitative and quantitative data.

Joanna Jordan French

Joanna has led and supported several qualitative and mixed methods studies and is trained in using Dedoose, NVivo, and Stata. As a graduate student, she led an exploratory qualitative study focused on how political agency is defined and formed by Maya indigenous women in Guatemala. She is currently involved in a mixed-methods study on how venture capital is shaping the future of public education quality and equity. Joanna is Senior Manager of Research and Policy at Innovate Public Schools. Prior to graduate school, she worked for MAIA Impact, an NGO focused on girls' education and empowerment in rural Guatemala, where she now serves on the Board of Directors. She also worked as an English teacher at a university in rural Bolivia. Joanna holds a MA in International Education Policy Analysis from the Stanford Graduate School of Education and a BA in Politics from Whitman College. As an undergraduate student, she spent five months studying abroad in Thailand and learning about Thai culture, politics, and international development.