Alumni of the quantitative methods are fine scholars who are making their independent contributions to the field.
Constance Mara
Dissertation Defense Date: July 30, 2013
Convocation Date: October 2013
Dissertation Title: Testing for equivalence of group variances
Current Position:
Research Associate, James M. Anderson Center for Health Systems Excellence, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. I am the patient-reported outcomes (PROs) measurement specialist, tasked with assisting clinical teams in their selection of patient-reported outcomes, determining the relevant information from PROs that are needed to make clinical decisions at the point of care (population norms, cut-points, minimally clinically important differences, etc..), integrating the research on PROs and quality improvement efforts that include PROs, and generating funding to support PRO research.
Research Interests:
- Development and psychometric analyses of patient-reported outcome measures that are efficient, highly reliable, informative, and can be used to inform clinical practice.
- Understanding the relationships among clinical interventions/process, patient-reported outcomes, and clinical outcomes in pediatric chronic conditions.
- Developing and implementing interventions that can be conducted from within an ambulatory health system that improve health-related quality of life and other functional outcomes.
- Applications of advanced statistical procedures to healthcare data.
Laura Mills
Dissertation Defense Date: April 7, 2014
Convocation Date: June 26, 2014
Dissertation Title: The effects of differential between-group skewness on homoscedastic, heteroscedastic trimmed mean, and rank-based between-groups procedures
Current Positions:
Director, Research & Evaluation, Pine River Institute (PRI). PRI is a 40-bed residential treatment centre and wilderness experience for teenagers with addictive behaviour and, more often than not, mental, relationship, and physical health problems. PRI adopts evidence-based practice for teens andtheir families to foster youth maturity, family functioning, and reduced crises. At Pine River, hope is a place. www.pineriverinstitute.com
Project Coordinator for EPYC (Evaluation Plan for Youth Care). EPYC is a province-wide project with the goal of increasing the capacity for youth treatment agencies to conduct evaluation on the health, relationship, and behaviour of their clients. We are doing this by building a common evaluation framework, piloting the framework, and sharing knowledge on how to implement evaluation. http://eenet.ca/dtfp/evaluation-plan-for-youth-care/
Research Interests:
- Fostering the uptake of outcome-oriented evaluation in the addiction sector, where evaluation is typically not part of practice.
- Using evaluation and research to understand whether intensive, long-term treatment makes immediate and sustained changes for teenagers with addiction, mental health, relationship, and behavioural problems.
- Exploring robust techniques for longitudinal data with small samples and myriad forms of missingness.
