CJRT Scholars

Catherine Paquette, PhD, is an Associate in Research with the Bellwether Collaborative for Health Justice. She completed her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on harm reduction interventions for physical and mental health among people who use criminalized drugs, including those affected by the criminal legal system. Dr. Paquette has over a decade of research and clinical experience in the fields of harm reduction and substance use disorder treatment. She previously managed harm reduction programs at a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C, and she has both conducted research and provided clinical services for people with substance use problems in multiple hospital settings, addiction treatment centers, at the VA, and with community-based syringe services programs. Her recent work includes developing and empirically evaluating a harm reduction-focused behavioral teletherapy intervention for people who inject drugs.

Emily Lupton Lupez, MD, MSc, MPH, is a primary care doctor and health services researcher at Boston Medical Center and Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. Dr. Lupez’s research focuses on access to care for marginalized populations, particularly criminal legal-involved populations. She is particularly interested in using implementation science to improve access to evidence-based preventative care, such as cancer screening, to those currently experiencing incarceration. Her current work is focused on understanding colorectal cancer screening practices in prison, identifying determinants of screening, and using implementation mapping to design strategies to improve implementation of evidence-based screening in prison. She is also interested in access to care for sexual and gender minority populations, particularly those with criminal legal involvement. 

Vidya Eswaran, MD, MAS,  is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine. As a physician and health services researcher, Dr. Eswaran’ research interests lie in improving outcomes for communities impacted by mass incarceration. She hopes to create Emergency Department-based and Emergency Department-adjacent interventions to address patients’ medical and psychosocial needs and believes strongly in community engagement throughout the research process. Dr. Eswaran received her bachelor’s degree in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX. She completed residency in Emergency Medicine at Northwestern University and subsequently was selected for the National Clinical Scholars Program at the University of California, San Francisco where she received a master’s degree in clinical research. In addition to her research-related efforts, Dr. Eswaran works clinically as an emergency medicine attending physician in St. Louis, Missouri.

Ruth Shefner, PhD, MPH, MSW is an incoming assistant professor of public health in the College of Population Health at Thomas Jefferson University. She received her PhD in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, and her Master of Public Health and Master of Social Work from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on identifying and addressing the public health harms of criminalization along the criminal legal system continuum. She has specific interests in evaluating harm reduction policing initiatives and examining criminal laws as structural determinants of health. Her work is informed by her prior experiences as a social worker directing a reentry program that supported individuals pre- and post-release from Philadelphia’s county jail system.

Julie V. Cristello, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at Brown University. Dr. Cristello graduated with her PhD in Clinical Science in Child and Adolescent Psychology from Florida International University. Her graduate research, which focused on the ways in which social contexts online (e.g., social media) and offline (e.g., parents, peers) impact alcohol and drug use among adolescents, was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Academy of Psychological Clinical Science. The ultimate goal of her work is to identify the most effective ways to deliver substance use services to underserved youth as a way to prevent juvenile legal involvement.

Dr. John Moore, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the College of Social Work at Florida State University. His research aims to identify and integrate the most critical determinants of substance use behavior change into interventions to promote the recovery and well-being of those impacted by substance misuse. He is particularly interested in identifying these determinants among persons with comorbid serious mental illness and persons with criminal justice involvement. His current research also focuses on identifying and promoting factors associated with engagement in healthy behaviors and healthcare utilization among persons experiencing substance misuse.

Sara Levintow, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She studies infectious disease dynamics in vulnerable populations, including those with mental health conditions, drug use, and involvement with the criminal legal system. Her research focuses on HIV and SARS-CoV-2. In those disease areas, she uses mathematical modeling and causal inference methods to improve understanding of the behavioral and biological determinants of transmission and to inform public health efforts that reduce morbidity and mortality. She is currently supported by a NIAID career development award (K01) to study SARS-CoV-2 transmission dynamics in North Carolina jails and evaluate the effects of interventions on COVID-19 disease burden.

Erin Eife, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law, and Society at George Mason University. Before her time at Mason, Erin was an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and her research is situated at the intersection of the criminal legal system and citizenship rights. She is primarily interested in how the criminal legal system acts as a stratifying mechanism for citizenship rights in the United States. Currently, her work considers the pretrial stage, the punishing role of surveillance, and the absence of the presumption of innocence. With the CJRT, she is exploring the impact that pretrial surveillance has on health outcomes and analyzing the understudied, yet increasingly important, function of surveillance as a social determinant of health.

Megan S. Irgens, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow in the Clinical Psychology Training Program at the University of California San Francisco. She received her PhD in psychology from the University of Arizona in 2023. Her research focuses on psychosocial maturity, substance use, and implementing and optimizing evidence-based behavioral health interventions for youth involved in the legal system.

Ryan E. Flinn, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Counseling Psychology at the University of North Dakota. Ryan’s work is focused on substance misuse, trauma, HIV transmission, and justice involvement, especially among sexual and gender minorities, people of color, and people living in poverty.

Helen Jack, MD, is an Assistant Professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine at University of Washington. Her research focuses on the implementation of mental health and addiction treatment in low-resource primary care settings. She is currently supported by a NIMH early career development award (K23) to study the implementation of depression treatment in primary care in Zimbabwe, work that builds on 10 years of mental health research and research capacity building she did there during medical training. A primary care physician, Dr. Jack practices in a rural state prison in Washington and is currently leading research on substance use treatment and HIV prevention in Washington prisons, supported by the NIH’s Ending the HIV Epidemic initiative. Dr. Jack graduated from Harvard Medical School and received a second BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.

Dr. Suzan Walters, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Population Health at Grossman School of Medicine and faculty at the Center for Opioid Epidemiology and Policy. She is also an Investigator at the Center for Drug Use and HIV/HCV Research, a Visiting Professor at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at the University of San Francisco, and a Lifespan/Brown Criminal Justice Scholar. Her research focuses on the social and structural determinants of health among populations who use drugs. She uses mixed-methods and community based participatory research methods. She is PI of a K01 grant focusing on intersectional stigma experiences pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) care continuum engagement among people who inject drugs in California and Colorado. She is also PI of two PhotoVoice projects exploring barriers and facilitators to overdose prevention center use in New York City. Her work is applied and aims to inform HIV prevention, overdose, and stigma reduction interventions.

Katherine LeMasters, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine in the Department of Medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. She has a secondary appointment in the Department of Epidemiology and is affiliate faculty at the University of Colorado Population Center. Trained as a social epidemiologist and community-engaged researcher, she studies the intersection of mass incarceration and health equity at the individual and community levels. Her current work focuses on how the felonization of fentanyl affects criminal legal involvement, substance use, and overdose; conditions of confinement such as solitary confinement and extreme heat; and how local jail incarceration and probation affects risk of overdose and suicide.

Milan Satcher, MD, MPH, is a T32 postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Community and Family Medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. She is a board-certified Family Medicine physician with additional fellowship training in Emergency Medicine. Her research focuses on mitigating opioid-related health disparities among families affected by mass criminalization, with a particular interest in developing technology-supported biopsychosocial strategies to optimize addiction and primary care transitions.

Daniel Teixeira da Silva, MD, MSHP, is the Medical Director at the Division of Substance Use Prevention and Harm Reduction at the Philadelphia Department of Public Health. He is trained in pediatrics and internal medicine and completed the National Clinician Scholar Program at the University of Pennsylvania in 2022. His work focuses on increasing the uptake of evidence-based practices in correctional settings, improving post-incarceration health outcomes, and addressing gaps in health services and health policy that reinforce health inequity.

Ben Bovell-Ammon, MD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Healthcare Delivery and Population Sciences at UMass Chan Medical School–Baystate. As a physician certified in Internal Medicine and Preventive Medicine, he practices primary care and addiction medicine at the Hampden County jail and a community health center. As a researcher, he studies healthcare delivery models and the policies that support them, such as Medicaid, to improve outcomes for individuals involved with the criminal legal system and returning from incarceration. He received his medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and MPH from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Utsha Khatri, MD, is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and Population Health and Policy and research faculty at the Institute for Health Equity Research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. As a physician and health services researcher, Dr. Khatri is interested in improving access, outcomes, and equity with regard to the health and health care of structurally marginalized populations. Her ongoing projects focus on the health care of individuals and communities affected by mass incarceration and those affected by substance use disorders. Dr. Khatri received her medical degree from the George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences. She completed residency in Emergency Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Following residency, she was selected for the National Clinician Scholars Program fellowship and received a master’s degree in Health Policy Research, also at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to her appointment as research faculty, Dr. Khatri practices clinically as an attending physician at Mount Sinai Hospital, an academic medical center, and at Elmhurst Hospital Center, a public hospital, in New York City.

Jordan White, DrPH, is an Assistant Professor of Social Work at Morgan State University. His research centers on understanding health disparities such as HIV, mental health, and correctional health among Black, Latino, and LGBTQ+ men in the United States. His interdisciplinary research has examined the individual, community and systems level factors that underlie health disparities and promoted resilience among these populations. Dr. White’s work seeks to understand how Black, Latino, and LGBTQ+ men use assets and resources to maintain their well-being. He is also conducting research exploring the role of crowdsourcing and open contests for public health promotion. Dr. White is trained in both social work and public health.