MCHP People

Rafael Pérez-Escamilla, Ph.D., is Professor of Public Health, and Director of the Office of Public Health Practice, the Global Health Concentration, and the Maternal Child Health Promotion track at the Yale School of Public Health. He is the PI of the Yale-Griffin CDC Prevention Research Center (PRC). His global public health nutrition and food security research program, supported with over $70 million in extramural funds, has contributed to improvements in breastfeeding and other maternal, infant and young child nutrition outcomes, iron deficiency anemia among infants, household food security, and early childhood development. He has co-led innovative mixed-methods implementation studies assessing the impact of community health worker person centered interventions on breastfeeding, type-2 diabetes, post-partum hypertension and mental health outcomes among in vulnerable communities, including people of color in the U.S. He has published over 340 research articles, 3 books/monographs, and numerous journal supplements, book chapters, and technical reports. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine (elected in 2019) and served in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) Food and Nutrition Board from 2012-18. He has been a senior advisor to maternal-child community nutrition programs as well as household food security measurement projects funded by the World Health Organization, the Pan American Health Organization, UNICEF, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), the U.S. Agency for International Development, The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH),The World Bank, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Governments across world regions. He obtained his BS in Chemical Engineering from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and his MS in Food Science and his PhD in Nutrition from the University of California at Davis. His postdoctoral training at UC Davis focused on the link between nutrition and early childhood development.

Donna Spiegelman was appointed the Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Biostatistics at the Yale School of Public Health in 2018; she is also Professor of Statistics and Data Science at Yale University. Dr. Spiegelman founded and directs the Yale Center for Methods in Implementation and Prevention Science (CMIPS) and she also leads the Global Oncology program at Yale Cancer Center. As one of the few people in the world with a joint doctorate in biostatistics and epidemiology, she can freely speak the languages of both disciplines and switches between these two professional cultures, playing the role of interlocutor for each. She is interested in problems arising in epidemiology that require resolution, at least in part, through biostatistics. The emerging field of implementation science is among Dr. Spiegelman's major areas of interest. This field examines barriers to the implementation of evidence-based interventions, as well as the factors that facilitate uptake of these tools. She founded CMIPS to develop tools for implementation science as well as to further the field's deployment to improve public health. The Center comprises 4 tenure-track full-time faculty members in biostatistics, social science and health economics; many additional faculty at YSPH and YSM; and PhD students, post-doctoral fellows, and master's degree students. With colleagues at CMIPS, she studies the design and conduct of implementation studies and pragmatic trials. Topics include stepped-wedge and cluster randomized trials; positive spillover effects; two-stage designs; causal inference for large-scale public health interventions, including causal mediation analysis; correction for biases related to non-adherence and measurement error; and external generalizability; among others. CMIPS also focuses on developing methodsfor learning health care systems. One of CMIPS' primary goals is to develop new statistical methods for implementation science. One such innovation is the Learn as You Go (LAGO) design, which allows researchers to repeatedly adapt ongoing trials in response to new trial data. Such designs help to prevent “failed trials." They can also optimize combination treatment regimens and inform cost-effective health promotion programs. Other biostatistical methods Dr. Spiegelman has developed relate to a wide range of topics, including meta-analysis, measurement error and misclassification, gene-environment and other interactions, smoothing, study design, and population-attributable risk. Before coming to Yale, she served as professor, mentor, and expert statistician at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health for nearly 30 years.

Dr. Amber Hromi-Fiedler is currently a Research Scientist in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the Yale School of Public Health. Dr. Hromi-Fiedler obtained her B.A. in Psychobiology from Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, in 1994. In 2002, she obtained her M.P.H. from the University of Connecticut and in 2007 she obtained her Ph.D. from the same university. Dr. Hromi-Fiedler specializes in community nutrition with emphasis in maternal and child health (MCH) both domestically and internationally. Internationally, she participated in the implementation of an MCH project with Save the Children in Uganda. In Ghana, with funding from the NIH, she developed and taught an intensive course to build the capacity of local Ghanaian health professional by enhancing their knowledge and skill of analyzing nutritional data using a public domain software available through the Centers for Disease Control. In Ghana, she also collaborated in the training of nutrition staff and the development of nutrition education materials for Liberian refugee caretakers at Buduburam Refugee Camp. The nutrition education materials focused on child nutrition as well as food safety and are currently being used and distributed to caretakers to improve nutritional outcomes among Liberian refugee children. She also conducted a postdoctoral summer fellowship in Ghana examining dietary practices, food availability, and nutritional status among Liberian refugees and Ghanaians living in and around Buduburam Refugee Camp.  She continues to work in Ghana on infant and young child feeding projects.  Domestically, she has taken the lead on the adaptation of the U.S. Food Security Scale, a national instrument to measure food insecurity, among pregnant Latina women. Dr. Hromi-Fiedler implemented one of the first longitudinal studies in Hartford, CT, examining the association between food insecurity during pregnancy and infant outcomes among Latinas. Dr. Hromi-Fiedler has also conducted feasibility research to develop a community-based intervention to increase fruit and vegetable consumption among low-income pregnant Latinas.  Dr. Hromi-Fiedler has presented her work at national and international conferences. Dr. Hromi-Fiedler has authored or co-authored several research articles in the fields of interest.