Welcoming New Faculty and Celebrating Promotions
Meet the New Faces Around SPH in 2026
SPH Faculty Promotions
Saria Awadalla, PhD, associate professor of biostatistics, focuses on high-dimensional data, joint modeling of latent growth curves, causal inference and randomized intervention trials. His applied research examines exposure to environmental mixtures, predictive models of chronic post-surgical pain and randomized clinical trial of the effects of glucocorticoids on cognitive outcomes in HIV+ women. Globally, he is assisting Sudan’s National Public Health Lab with their efforts to conduct surveillance and statistical modeling of COVID-19 case data as well as that of other endemic diseases such as malaria and cholera.
Yuka Asada, PhD, RD, is a Registered Dietitian and Clinical Associate Professor of Community Health Sciences in the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois Chicago. She has advanced training and over a decade of experience conducting qualitative and mixed methods studies that examine nutrition policy implementation related to K-12 schools, early childcare settings, and sugary beverage taxation. Across these topics, her research seeks to understand how nutrition policy implementation can advance health equity. She is a dedicated educator in the Doctor of Public Health in Leadership (DrPH) at SPH (UIC).
Leslie Carnahan, PhD ’20, MPH ’12, a health disparities population researcher, is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Division of Community Health Sciences and a Research Scientist at the Office of Community Engagement and Health Equity at the University of Illinois Cancer Center. Their work is focused on understanding and addressing cancer health inequities in screening, diagnosis, and treatment through engaging in community-driven research. She also serves as a public health consultant and evaluator for statewide cancer-related programs in Illinois. More recently, she has been working with the Illinois Department of Public Health to build out the legislatively-mandated Community Health Worker Certification and Reimbursement Program. Their research specialties include expertise in quantitative (survival analysis, latent class analysis), qualitative, and mixed methods, program evaluation, and community-engaged research.
Elizabeth Jarpe-Ratner, PhD ’18, MPH, MST, (she/they) is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Division of Health Policy and Administration, a Core Faculty member of the Doctor of Public Health Leadership Program, and an investigator with the Policy, Practice and Prevention Research Center (P3RC). Dr. Jarpe-Ratner has nearly two decades of research and evaluation experience working across the fields of governmental public health, K-12 education, adolescent and school-based health, and community organizations, including community power building organizations to better understand how to adopt and implement policy, systems, environmental, and practice changes. She works collaboratively with practice partners to incorporate evaluation findings into practice. Her evaluations have led directly to policy changes, staffing changes, budget allocations, and the creation of training systems, technical assistance strategies, and materials to better support child, family, and worker wellbeing.
Preethi Pratap, PhD, MSc, is a Research Associate Professor in the Division of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences. She also serves as Core faculty in the Doctorate in Public Health Leadership Program, and is the Director of Continuing Education and Outreach for the Illinois Education and Research Center. Dr. Pratap is a graduate of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Epidemic Intelligence Service Fellowship, and has over a decade of experience in inter-disciplinary research in a variety of public health settings in occupational health, environmental health, health policy, infectious diseases, and food safety. A large part of her prior scholarly practice focused on partnering with local and global organizations to develop, deliver and evaluate educational interventions to translate best practices in public health for healthcare workers, medical professionals and occupational health professionals. Dr. Pratap’s current research interest is to facilitate the translation of data to action through participatory action research processes to inform policy, systems and environmental change.
Welcome New Faculty
Abhery Das, PhD, researches how policies and inequitable social systems affect the mental and maternal health of communities of color. Her dissertation focused on institutional racism in the criminal justice system and how police stops, police killings of unarmed Black Americans and incarceration result in greater psychiatric help-seeking in the broader Black population. Currently, she is evaluating how drug reform policies affect mental health in communities of color, as well as suicide prevention measures among youth of color. In another line of work, she assesses how policies and community-level factors influence disparities in cesarean births. Prior to her career in research, Abhery worked in healthcare change management consulting, mental health rehabilitation, and psychiatric clinical trials.
Shannon Zenk, PhD, MPH, is a population health scientist, educator, and leader driving policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) solutions to advance health equity. Motivated by community concerns about access to affordable, healthy food in Detroit, Dr. Zenk conducted one of the first U.S. studies examining food deserts. She has since built a transdisciplinary team-science research program that extends from neighborhood food environments to broader structural and social determinants of health. Across her career, she has defined the field by (1) documenting social inequities in neighborhood food and built environments and their associations with health, (2) developing approaches to measure environmental exposures using geospatial big data, mobile sensing, ecological momentary assessment, and systematic social observation, and (3) generating evidence to understand for whom and under what conditions PSE, behavioral, and clinical interventions work. Following 14 years on the faculty at the University of Illinois Chicago, Dr. Zenk served as Director of the National Institute of Nursing Research at the National Institutes of Health. She also conducted research as an investigator at the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.
Hannah Matzke, PhD ’23, MS ’16, is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Division of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences. She teaches IPHS 450 Foundations and Determinants of Public Health online, which introduces foundational principles and public health frameworks, and its application in public health practice. She specializes in the management and administration of large community-based surveys, survey design, and advanced sampling. Her research primarily focuses on injury epidemiology, work, and built environments for people with disabilities.
Ramon Lopez, PhD ’13, MS ’10, CIH, most recently served as the Division Officer for Industrial Hygiene at the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center, where he directed the industrial hygiene programs for the North Chicago VA and the Navy Midwest region. Previously, he worked as a research faculty member and postdoctoral fellow at Indiana University’s Fairbanks School of Public Health, teaching undergraduate courses and conducting specialized research on non-ionizing radiation. A proud alumnus of UIC, Dr. Lopez earned both his MS and PhD from the UIC School of Public Health.
Victor Florez-Garcia, PhD, is a researcher and educator specializing in public health and epidemiology. He holds a master’s degree in Epidemiology from the Universidad CES and a bachelor’s degree in Biology from the Universidad de Sucre. His dissertation focused on the impacts of real-world exposure to mixtures of toxic and nutrient metals on child cognition in Mexico City. This dissertation looked to examine the relationship between pre and postnatal mental exposures and children’s intellectual functioning in the Mexican context while including new methodological approaches to incorporate all the available biomarker information from a longitudinal birth cohort study. His research interests include children’s cognition, environmental health, and metal exposure in migrant Latinx communities. Victor’s contributions extend beyond academia, as he has been a co-investigator on various projects, including the ASCUS, PRECAMA, and Migration projects, as well as a consultant for health departments and PAHO in Colombia.
Melissa Sharer, PhD, MPH, MSW, is program director of UIC’s Online Master of Public Health and has more than 30 years of experience working in public health. She began her career in global health as a Peace Corps volunteer in Armenia before earning degrees in public health and social work. Her work later took her to communities around the world, where she worked across areas including maternal and child health, water and sanitation, environmental health and infectious disease. Over the last decade, her work has increasingly focused on communities closer to home along the Iowa-Illinois border, including mental health and gun violence prevention. She has taught public health and social work at the graduate level since 2014, and her current research focuses on health equity for refugees and immigrants, foster youth and communities impacted by gun violence.
Shlesma Chhetri, PhD, MPH, CPH, CHES, is a public health educator, researcher, and program evaluation specialist with more than a decade of experience in community health, public health practice, and higher education. Shlesma has led and contributed to research and projects addressing health equity, mental health, violence prevention, chronic disease, reentry services, and community well-being.