PROJECT GOOD ORAL HEALTH
Good Oral Health is an oral health research program based on three federally funded National Institute for Health (NIH) studies that encompasses nine years of collaborative, multidisciplinary formative and intervention research focused on helping senior housing residents in need of improved oral health care and knowledge learn how to best manage their oral health.
Project Summary
The three studies, funded by grants from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, include: Building Collaborative Research Infrastructure to Reduce Oral Health Disparities among Low Income Older Adults (1 RC4 DE021324, 2010 – 2013), Changing Oral Health Norms and Hygiene Practices among Vulnerable Older Adults Project GOH!: Good Oral Health (R34 DE022271-01, 2011 – 2013) and Good Oral Health: A Bi-level Intervention to Improve Older Adult Oral Health (1U01 DE024168, 2014-2019).
- The first study built a state, community and university partnership for geriatric oral health research and intervention.
- The second study tested a pilot for improving oral health and hygiene with residents of one publically subsidized building housing older adults and people with disabilities.
- The third is a five year clinical trial to evaluate components of the pilot intervention against each other over several cycles and added a sustainability component.
Over the course of these studies, our multidisciplinary teams have included researchers, health and social service providers, community outreach specialists and student interns in the following areas of expertise: anthropology, sociology, dentistry, dental hygiene, social work, nursing, medicine, adult education, public health, community outreach and biostatistics. All members of our research teams have brought with them a strong commitment to improve oral health knowledge and self-management, and to eliminate oral health disparities among vulnerable, low income community residents.
Research partners across studies include the Institute for Community Research (ICR) , University of Connecticut (UConn) School of Dental Medicine, North Central Area Agency on Aging (NCAAA), staff of local housing authorities and privately managed senior housing sites throughout central CT, and independently living residents of those buildings.
Our Team
Amauri Barbosa, MSDH
He graduated from the University of Bridgeport – Fones School of Dental Hygiene with an Associate’s Degree in 2007 and with Masters of Science in Dental Hygiene in 2015 from the University of Bridgeport. He joined the UConn Health in May of 2015 where he works as a dental hygiene researcher for the GOH Project which is conducted in partnership with the Institute for Community Research.
James Grady, PhD
Zahira Medina, BA
Zahira Medina B.A. (3 years at School of Medicine), is a committed community activist, has worked in the HIV/AIDS Prevention and Substance Abuse and Mental Health field. In addition, she was working in the Mayor’s Healthy Communities Initiative Project, to improve healthcare access for Hartford uninsured residents and their families. She has more than 20 years of experience in program development, implementation and management. In 1991 and 1999 she was nominated for Connecticut Health Commissioner’s “AIDS Leadership Award.”
Rita Bodea, BS
Rita Bodea is a Dental Hygienist. Rita received her Bachelors of Science degree in Dental Hygiene from the University of New Haven. She has worked as a clinical dental hygienist for many years in private practice and most recently has been working for the Uconn Health Center and The Institute of Community Research as a dental hygiene researcher. She is currently working on a NIDCR-funded study, Good Oral Health: A Bi-level Intervention to Improve Older Adult Oral Health.
Rajesh Lalla, DDS, PhD
Dr. Lalla is a board-certified clinician and scholar who conducts clinical research on a variety of oral mucosal disorders, including mucositis secondary to cancer treatment, recurrent aphthous stomatitis (canker sores) and oral candidiasis (thrush). His research has been funded by the federal government (through the National Institutes of Health), the American Cancer Society, the Donaghue Foundation, and industry. In addition to clinical care and research, Dr. Lalla is also involved in clinical and classroom teaching of Oral Medicine and directs a course on Evidence-based Decision Making. Dr. Lalla serves as Associate Dean for Research in the School of Dental Medicine. He also serves on several institutional committees and is a past Chair of the Institutional Review Board, which oversees the conduct of clinical research. Dr. Lalla holds several leadership positions at the international level. He is currently President of the Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer (MASCC), an international professional organization of healthcare professionals from over 60 countries. Dr. Lalla has written more than 85 peer-reviewed scientific articles or book chapters, many of them dealing with oral complications in cancer patients. He is also asked to speak on oral complications of cancer therapy at the national and international levels. He has reviewed articles written by others for over 25 scientific journals. Dr. Lalla also serves as a consultant on various topics including oral mucositis, oropharyngeal candidiasis, recurrent aphthous stomatitis, and clinical trial design and outcomes.
Kim Radda, RN, MA
Kim Radda, an anthropologist and registered nurse, is a Research Associate at ICR. She has conducted extensive community-based research on substance abuse, HIV risk, and the health and mental health of older adults, as well as research on rural women’s social and economic roles in Mexico. She also has worked to develop and implement arts-based interventions that provide opportunities for elderly and at-risk individuals to tell their stories. She received undergraduate degrees from Greater Hartford Community College and the University of Connecticut, graduate degrees from UConn, and is a graduate of the Women’s Leadership Institute of the Hartford Seminary. She holds an appointment as Clinical Instructor in the Department of Community Medicine and Health Care at the UConn School of Medicine and is a member of the UConn Health Center IRB. Currently, she is a Co-Investigator on the 5-year NIDCR-funded study, Good Oral Health: A Bi-level Intervention to Improve Oral Health among Vulnerable Older Adults, Program Coordinator for a pilot program to develop a community research alliance and forge equitable community-university research partnerships to reducing health disparities, and the Co-Chair of ICR’s IRB.
Colleen Foster-Bey, M.Ed
Colleen Foster-Bey is a Research Associate and health educator, with a focus on the adult learner. She has worked on research projects that address barriers to oral health that confront older adults and people with disabilities who reside in-low income and minority community senior housing. She has worked as a community liaison in facilitating community and university research collaboration through ICR’s partnership with the Connecticut Institute for Clinical and Translational Science. Colleen is currently Intervention Coordinator on the NIDCR –funded study, Good Oral Health: A Bi-level Intervention to Improve Older Adult Oral Health. Colleen was also a Research Trainer in ICR’s National Teen Action Research Institute. Before working at ICR, Colleen was Assistant Director of the Center for International Community Health Studies at the University of Connecticut Health Center’s School of Medicine.
Jianghong Li, MD, MS
Jianghong Li is a Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Community Research. Dr. Li was trained in preventive medicine, health education, and community epidemiology. Her primary research interests include social, cultural, and network influences on health or risk behavior, Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS), community based multi-level or peer intervention, and integration of a variety of qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Dr. Li’s research is primarily focused on drug users, commercial sex workers, urban and rural low income and other hard to reach populations in the United States and China. Dr. Li is the PI of IDU Peer Recruitment Dynamics and Network Structure in RDS, and Sociocultural Factors on Syringe Sharing and HIV Risks among Injection Drug Users in Guangdong, China. She also served as Co-PI or Co-Investigator on five other NIH funded domestic and international HIV prevention studies that utilize interdisciplinary methods.
Susan Reisine, PhD - Principal Investigator
Dr. Reisine is Professor Emerita and formerly was Associate Dean for Research at the University of Connecticut School of Dental Medicine. Her area of expertise is community-based health research among low-income populations including the oral health of older adults, early childhood caries and asthma. She has been the recipient of numerous research grants from National Institutes of Health, the Connecticut Health Foundation and the Arthritis Foundation. She has been recognized for her research accomplishments with several national and international awards and her work has been widely published in scholarly journals.
David Reyes, BA
David Reyes is a peer advocate for the DMHAS-funded Partnership for Success initiative, organizing the development of a social marketing campaign, creating a coalition website, and building a community coalition to reduce youth prescription drug misuse in West Hartford, CT. David studied Anthropology at Central Connecticut State University and is going on to study Social Work at the University of Connecticut. He has a background in educational anthropology and in both qualitative and quantitative research methods.
Eduardo Robles
Eduardo Robles is a health educator and community outreach interviewer. For the last twenty two years he has worked in community-based research that focuses on HIV/AIDS and Substance Abuse Prevention and Mental Health with a diverse range of marginalized populations including low-income and the homeless in the cities of Hartford and New Haven and throughout Fairfield County. Eduardo is currently the Spanish bi-lingual interventionist on the NIDCR –funded study, Good Oral Health: A Bi-level Intervention to Improve Older Adult Oral Health.
Apoorva Salvi, BDS, MPH
Apoorva Salvi is the Data Manager/Analyst at ICR. Apoorva received her Masters in Public Health Degree in Epidemiology from Texas A&M University School of Public Health and her Bachelors in Dentistry from India. She has a background in quantitative data analysis in oral health, infectious diseases, and epidemiology. Her research areas focus around oral health, tobacco cessation and HIV to improve the health conditions through community based research. She is currently working on the data management and analysis on Good Oral Health: A Bi-level Intervention to Improve Oral Health among Vulnerable Older Adults and the HIV Test & Treat (T&T) continuum of services in the Greater Hartford area in Connecticut aiming to understand how systemic processes affect HIV community viral load (CVL).
Jean Schensul, PhD - Principal Investigator
A medical/educational anthropologist with interdisciplinary experience in the development and implementation of collaborative and participatory research in health, culture and education. From 1978-1987, as Research Director, Hispanic Health Council, she developed its research and training infrastructure and initiated partnership research on HIV in Hartford. From 1987 – 2004, as founding director of ICR she guided the development of the organization’s collaborative research mission and blueprint for research tracks, its program of art/science fusion, the ICR gallery, cultural programs, Y-PAR program, and a diverse funding portfolio. Since 2004 she has developed her own full-time research and teaching/training program while continuing to mentor others. Her research is eclectic, shaped by community interests and has ranged from early childhood development through older adult health. Her NIH, CDC and SAMHSA grants have focused on emerging adulthood, substance abuse prevention using participatory action research, with youth, health of older adults and alcohol, tobacco and HIV in India. She is editor/co-author (with Margaret LeCompte, U.Colorado Boulder), of the Ethnographer’s Toolkit, a 7-book set outlining a mixed methods approach to community based research and intervention (1stedition 1999; 2nd edition 2010-2014), and has published more than 120 peer reviewed papers and book chapters. She plays a national role in promoting community-initiated research partnerships with universities, building community research capacity and mentoring diverse young scholars to conduct community based participatory research. Dr. Schensul was the recipient of the 2010 Malinowski Career Award for contributions of research to solution of human problems (Society for Applied Anthropology), and the American Anthropological Association 1992 Solon Kimball Award for contributions of anthropology to policy (with Stephen Schensul) and has held elected leadership roles in both organizations. She has lived in Hartford since 1978. She is also adjunct research professor, University of Connecticut School of Dental Medicine, and Research Affiliate, Yale University where she was a co-founder of the Yale Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA).
Acknowledgements
Senior Researchers
Efthimia Ioannidou, DDS, MDSc, UCONN School of Dental Medicine
Joanna Douglass, DDS, UCONN School of Dental Medicine
Ruth Goldblatt, DMD, FAGD, UCONN School of Dental Medicine
Student Interns
Undergraduate Students
Andreea Dinicu, BS
Abigail Raynor, MPH
Stephanie Kisciras, BASc
Dental Fellows UCONN School of Medicine
Daniela Cuadra, DDS
Luis Miron, DDS
Graduate Dental Students
Chelsea Murphy, DMD
Demetress Davis, DDS, MDS
Graduate Students
Hector Maldonado, MA
Ruth Hernandez, Ph.D.
Jeremy Figueroa-Ortiz, MA
Jonkay Jacobs, MA
Julie Miller
Laura Jensen
Lourdes Janer, MSW
Research Staff
Clara Acosta-Glynn, MSW, MPH, Field Researcher, North Central Agency on Aging
Emil Coman, Ph.D., Data Analyst Institute for Community Research
Candace Corbeil, BA, Data Manager, Institute for Community Research
Helena Hilario, BA, Data Manager, Institute for Community Research
Mitch Irving, MPH, Data Manager, Institute for Community Research
Brian Tantillo, BA, Data Manager, Institute for Community Research
Yacihuila Moni, MA, Data Manager, Institute for Community Research
Ken Plourd, Research Assistant, Institute for Community Research
Luz Rohena, Field Researcher/Interviewer, Institute for Community Research
Administrative Personnel
Paul Hubobenko, BA, CRA
Wendy Walsh, CRA
Connie Yan, BA
Megan Clement, CCRP, DA
Linda Burian, MS
Emily Marble, MBA
Susan Murphy, CPA
Laura Didden
Cynthia Smith
Collaborating Organization
Robyn Harper-Gulley
North Central Agency on Aging
