Investigators
Margarita Alegria | Nicholas Carson | Chih-nan Chen | Benjamin Cook | Norah Mulvaney-Day
Margarita Alegria, Ph.D. is the Director of the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research and a professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Alegria researches mental health services for Latinos and other ethnic populations. She is currently the Principal Investigator of the Advanced Center for Mental Health Disparities, and the Latino arm of the National Latino and Asian American Study, as well as the Co-Principal Investigator of the CHA-UPR Excellence in Partnerships for Community Outreach, Research on Health Disparities and Training (EXPORT) Center. Her published works focus on mental health services research, conceptual and methodological issues with minority populations, risk behaviors, and disparities in service delivery. Dr. Alegria received her Ph.D. from Temple University.
Email: malegria@charesearch.org Phone: 617-503-8447
Recent Publications
Alegria M, Shrout P, Torres M, Lewis-Fernandez R, Abelson J, Powell M, Lin JY, Interian A, Laderman M, & Canino, G. (2009). Lessons learned from the clinical reappraisal of the composite international diagnostic interview with Latinos. International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research, 18(2):84-95.
Guarnaccia P, Lewis-Fernandez R, Pincay IM, Shrout P, Guo J, Torres M, Canino G & Alegria, M. (2010). Ataques de Nervios as a marker of social and psychiatric vulnerability: Results from the NLAAS. International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 53(3):298-309.
Alegria M, Wong Y, Mulvaney-Day N, Nillni A, Proctor E, Nickel M, Jones L, Green B, Koegel P, Wright A, Wells K. (2011). Community-based partnered research: New directions in mental health services research. Ethnicity and Disease, 21(3):S1-S8.
Molina KM, Chen C-N, Alegria M, Li H. (2012). Prevalence of neurasthenia, comorbidity, and association with impairment among a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. [Epub ahead of print]
Nicholas Carson MD, FRCPC is an Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a Research Associate at the CMMHR. He is also a staff child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Cambridge Health Alliance, where he teaches clinical scholarship and psychopharmacology to child psychiatry fellows. Dr. Carson’s research aims to improve mental health services for multicultural communities, particularly among youth. He has studied the quality of mental health services for Haitian, African American, and White youth and how physical symptoms matter for adult patients and clinicians during mental health intakes. He is a co-investigator on the DECIDE study. He is also interested in the impact of mass media and technology on youth development. Dr. Carson received his M.D. from McGill University and did his psychiatric training at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and the Cambridge Health Alliance/Harvard Medical School.
Email: ncarson@charesearch.org Phone: 617-575-5269
Recent Publications
Alegría M, Carson NJ, Goncalves M, Keefe K. (2011). Disparities in treatment for substance use disorders and co-occurring disorders for ethnic/racial minority youth. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 50(1):22-31.
Carson NJ, Cook BL, Alegria M. (2010). Social determinants of mental health treatment among Haitian, African American, and white youth in community health centers. Journal of Healthcare for the Poor and Underserved, 21(2):32-48. (“Article of Interest” for May 28, 2010, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality)
Cook BL, Carson NJ, Alegria M. (2010). Assessing racial/ethnic differences in the social consequences of early-onset psychiatric disorder. Journal of Healthcare for the Poor and Underserved, 21(2 Suppl):49-66.
Carson NJ, Katz N, Gao N, Alegria M. (2010). Assessment of physical illness by mental health clinicians during intake visits. Psychiatric Services, 61:32-37.
Chih-nan Chen, Ph.D. is a Research Analyst at the Center. He received a Master of Economics from National Taiwan University in 1999, and a Ph.D. from the Department of Economics at Boston University. Dr. Chen´s fields of research include Bayesian data analysis and multiple imputation.
Email: cchen@charesearch.org Phone:617-503-8476
Recent Publications
Multiple Imputation for Response Biases in NLAAS Due to Survey Instruments (with Xiao-Li Meng, Jingchen Liu and Margarita Alegria) 2006 Proceedings of the American Statistical Association, Alexandria, VA: American Statistical Association.
Power-Shrinkage and Trimming: Two Ways to Mitigate Excessive Weights (with Nanhua Duan, Xiao-Li Meng and Margarita Alegria) 2006 Proceedings of the American Statistical Association, Alexandria, VA: American Statistical Association.
Benjamin Cook, Ph.D., M.P.H. is a Senior Scientist at the CMMHR and an assisstant professor at Harvard Medical School. His research interests are in improving methods for measuring disparities, and applying these methods to understanding the mechanisms underlying mental health and substance abuse treatment disparities, the association between acculturation and mental health, and geographic differences in mental health service use disparities. He received a Ph.D. in Health Policy at Harvard University concentrating in Evaluative Science and Statistics, a MPH from UNC-Chapel Hill in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education, and a BA in psychology from Swarthmore College.
Email: bcook@charesearch.org Phone: 617-503-8449
Recent Publications
Cook B, McGuire TG, Zaslavsky AM. (in press). Measuring racial/ethnic disparities in health care: Methods and practical issues. Health Services Research.
Cook B, Alegria M. (2011). Racial-ethnic disparities in substance abuse treatment: The role of criminal history and socioeconomic status. Psychiatric Services, 61(11):1273-1281.
Cook B, McGuire TG, Alegria M, Normand S-L. (2011). Crowd-out and exposure effects of physical comorbidities on mental health care use: Implications for racial-ethnic disparities in access. Health Services Research, 46:1259-1280.
Norah Mulvaney-Day, Ph.D., is a Senior Scientist at the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research at the Cambridge Health Alliance, and an Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Mulvaney-Day received her Ph.D. in mental health policy from Brandeis University, where she was an NIMH trainee in mental health services research. She has broad expertise using both qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze problems of health disparities, as well as experience in community based participatory research and policy research. Recent work includes mixed methods investigations of preferences for health across race and ethnicity, as well as a longitudinal analysis of the process of implementation of the Massachusetts health reform among ethnic/racial minorities receiving mental health care in a public safety net setting.
Email: nmulvaney-day@charesearch.org Phone: 617-503-8448
Recent Publications
Mulvaney-Day N, Earl T, Diaz-Linhart Y, Alegria M. (2010). Preferences for relational style with mental health clinicians: A qualitative comparison of African American, Latino and Non-Latino White patients. Journal of Clinical Psychology, Oct 11 [Epub ahead of print].
Mulvaney-Day N, Horvitz-Lennon M, Chen C-N, Laderman M, Alegria M. (2010). Valuing health in a racially and ethnically diverse community sample: An analysis using the valuation metrics of money and time. Quality of Life Research, 19(10):1529-1540.