Students & training

Dr. Rebecca Reno completed her postdoctoral fellowship training with the Wallace Center from 2018-2020. Dr. Reno’s research focused on bi-directional translational research, including the development and evaluation of culturally grounded interventions to address social and structural determinants of health contributing to disparate birth outcomes. Dr. Reno worked on several projects while at the Wallace Center including developing a proposal to conduct app-based research with Wildflower assessing pregnancy outcomes for publicly insured women. She also worked with partners at UCSF to conduct a design sprint with low-income Black women on their readiness and responsiveness to telehealth visits and develop an implementation science study based on the findings. Dr. Reno has an MSW and PhD in social work from Ohio State University, and a MA in education policy.

Dr. Christiana von Hippel was a postdoctoral fellow with the Wallace Center in partnership with the Center of Excellence in Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health from 2018-2020. Dr. von Hippel’s research focused on diverse communities of women innovate (User Innovation) to solve sexual and reproductive health problems when interventions designed by healthprofessionals are inaccessible or insufficient to meet their needs. Her work while at the Wallace Center included analyzing 2 million user-generated comments from social networks (e.g.Reddit) to assess the pregnancy, postpartum, and newborn care concerns of new mothersand the behavioral product innovations developed by women. Dr. von Hippel also assessed how women discuss and cope with contraceptive side effects through user innovation and digitalethnography methods. Dr. von Hippel earned her doctorate in Social Epidemiology from the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and her MPH from Indiana University Bloomington School of Public Health. She is currently a Research Scientist at For Goodness Sake.

Lauren Dinsmore (MPH ‘22) is a current first-year MPH student who previously worked in technology education providing support to adult learners on higher education. While at UC Berkeley, Lauren hopes to study education equity, childhood health outcomes, and the inter-section of technology in public health.

Hannah Hecht (MPH ‘22) is a current first-year MPH student who previously worked in non-profit organization implementing and evaluating strengths-based, psychosocial intervention for mothers and children for low-income, Latino communities. While at UC Berkeley, Hannah hopes to better understand the incorporation of state-of-the-art technology into methods for studying and researching maternal-child health outcomes.

Sarah Han (MPH ‘21) is a current second year in the MCAH MPH program. Since fall 2019, Sarah has worked on a variety of strategic planning and communication projects with The Wallace Center.  Sarah previously conducted research at Berkeley Media Studies Group, a media advocacy organization, to understand how public health issues are represented in the news and on social media. Most recently she redesigned and developed The Wallace Center website.

Elizabeth Pleasants (MPH ‘19) is a current first year in the DrPH program and has worked with The Wallace Center since 2017 when she was completing her MPH in MCAH. Elizabeth worked with Dr. Sylvia Guendelman and Dr. Ndola Prata using customized Google APIs to characterize the landscape of internet searches related to birth control and abortion, with a focus on states with poor reproductive health outcomes and restrictive legal policies on abortion. Currently, Elizabeth is working alongside faculty to help train undergraduate students in this methodology and further use these methods to use search engine data to assess other MCAH outcomes.

Grace Krueger (MPH ‘21)  is a current second year in the MCAH MPH program. She is working with Dr. Kim Harley and Dr. Sylvia Guendleman on research assessing telehealth and remote monitoring for pregnant patients during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. 

Julia Ryan is a first year doctoral student in the Doctorate of Public Health Program. She is currently working with Dr. Ndola Prata and Dr. Julianna Deardorff to use a discrete choice experiment to conduct sexual and reproductive health service planning for adolescents. Prior to this project, Julia also worked with Dr. Cassondra Marshall utilizing online data and data science to advance family planning research.

Andrea Mackey (MPH ‘21) is a current second year in the Health and Social Behavior MPH Program. She is working with Dr. Coco Auerswald and Dr. Ndola Prata to use google search engine data to give voice to the needs of California youth experiencing homelessness during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cheng Ren is a doctoral student in the School of Social Welfare PhD Program working with Dr. Cassondra Marshall. Cheng brings their data science training and natural language processing skills to work on our analysis of online communication about contraception on Reddit, a popular social news aggregator and media website.

Erin Hubbard (MPH ’21) is a current second year in the MCAH MPH program. She is currently working with Dr. Cassondra Marshall on multiple projects, including gathering stakeholder perspectives on research about community doula care in California.

Nika Darvish is a third-year undergraduate student studying Public Health and Molecular & Cell Biology. Nika is working with Dr. Jaspal Sandhu to examine the future of maternal healthcare in the United States by conducting stakeholder interviews with expectant mothers, doulas, midwives, and technology innovators.