The Heller School for Social Policy and Management

Behavioral Health Concentration

Robert Bohler

Robert Bohler, MPH, is a PhD student and NIAAA pre-doctoral trainee studying behavioral health policy. He received an MPH with an emphasis in Epidemiology from the Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health at Georgia Southern University and received an AB in Economics from the University of Georgia. Before coming to Brandeis, Mr. Bohler worked in collegiate recovery and community-based efforts for substance use disorder (SUD). Most recently, Mr. Bohler served as a grant writer for a proposal that was awarded $230,000 annually for a recovery community organization in his community. He has published on the SUD continuum of care and his research interests are in recovery science, opioid prescribing, and developing effective SUD treatment systems.

Emily Crandall

Emily Ledingham Crandall, MPH, is a PhD student and NIAAA pre-doctoral trainee studying behavioral health policy. She received a Master of Public Health from Westminster College and a Bachelor of Science in Sociology from the University of Utah. Prior to her doctoral studies, Emily worked for nearly four years at the State of Utah Department of Human Services Division of Services for People with Disabilities as a policy research consultant. In this position, she secured two grants ($453,594 and $218,500) to fund new programs to address sexual violence against people with disabilities in Utah and worked on several policy projects related to the Home and Community-Based Services Final Settings Rule, a major civil rights policy for people with disabilities receiving Medicaid funded services. She also taught as an adjunct professor at Westminster College in the public health program for three years, teaching program planning and evaluation, social and behavioral health, and epidemiology. Her research interests include improving social service systems, civil rights of people with disabilities, substance use and abuse among people with disabilities, and healthcare access. 

Alex Duarte

Alex graduated from Bentley University in 2019 and received a dual bachelors degree in public policy and business studies. During his time at Bentley, Alex’s research focused on policy indicators found within the substance abuse policy domain. More specifically, Alex has focused on how opioid overdose rates and lobbying efforts made by the pharmaceutical industry work to affect policymakers attention to the current opioid crisis. During his time at Bentley, Alex worked at the Peace Corps Headquarters in Washington DC and Project Weber, a Rhode Island-based harm reduction center for male and transgender sex workers.
Corrine Holliday-Stocking, PhD student

Corrine Holliday-Stocking

Corrine Holliday-Stocking received an MS in Sociology from Portland State University and a BS in Sociology from Gonzaga University. She currently teaches at Worcester State University in the sociology department. She teaches courses on medical sociology, research methods, and gender and sexuality. Her research interests include mental health in higher education, the LGBTQ+ population, and equity and inclusion.

Alexandra Kritikos

Alexandra F. Kritikos, MA, is a PhD Student studying health and behavioral health policy at the Heller School at Brandeis University. She is a National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism Pre-Doctoral Fellow. Her current research includes work on cannabis regulatory policy, commercialization, and youth prevention. Before coming to Heller, she worked as an economist in the fields of micro-and-macroeconomics. Ms. Kritikos is a graduate research assistant in the Institute for Behavioral Health and has been on several research projects. Her work has been presented at annual conferences, and she serves as a co-author on various reports. Beyond her research interests, Ms. Kritikos is very passionate about teaching and mentoring, and teaches various economics and health policy courses. She received her MA in Applied Economics from Northeastern University, and her BS in Economics from the University of Patras, Greece.

Ruslan V. Nikitin

Ruslan V. Nikitin is a PhD candidate studying the effects of egocentric social networks/ relationships on type 2 diabetes and unhealthy alcohol use among midlife and older adults. He is also a pre-doctoral NIAAA/NIH trainee and 2020 Social Networks & Health fellow at the Duke Network Analysis Center. Professionally, Ruslan is a health policy analyst at Harvard Catalyst, working to improve community health by accelerating evidence translation into policy and practice. Prior to joining Harvard, he provided research and project management support at the Heller School’s Institute for Behavioral Health, which resulted in several publications on prevention of substance abuse and opioid misuse. Ruslan holds master's degrees in Social Policy and International Health Policy and Management from Brandeis University.

Morgan Shields

Morgan Shields, M.Sc., M.A., is a Ph.D. candidate and National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism T-32 pre-doctoral trainee. She received her M.Sc. in public health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and her B.A. in psychology from Kent State University. Ms. Shields currently researches quality and accountability of behavioral healthcare, with a particular focus on inpatient psychiatric care. She has been the lead author on nearly a dozen peer-reviewed papers that have been published in outlets such as Health Affairs, Psychiatric Services, and Medical Care Research and Review, among others. Notably, Ms. Shields is one of few health services researchers studying inpatient psychiatric care in the United States and her work is having impact. For example, her research motivated the Veterans Health Administration to conduct an internal investigation and implement an intervention to improve trauma-informed care in their eastern region inpatient psychiatric facilities, as well as the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health to publicly commit to revamping their critical incident reporting system. She has been the recipient of several awards, including the 2017 Rappaport Public Policy Fellowship through the Harvard Kennedy School, during which she worked at the Massachusetts statehouse on community mental health legislation. Ms. Shields will be on the job market during the 2019-2020 cycle and is ultimately interested in faculty positions at research-intensive universities. 
Deborah Strod, PhD student and NIAAA trainee concentrating in Behavioral Health

Deborah Strod

Deborah Strod is a PhD student and NIAAA pre-doctoral trainee concentrating in Behavioral Health. She received an MSW from Boston University and an AB from Harvard University. She focuses on addictions workforce development for specialist and non-specialist positions, examining how responses to existing worker shortages are being reshaped by healthcare integration, cross-system coordination, changes in demand, and advances in scientific understanding of addiction. She is exploring worker and job flow within local treatment ecosystems, and is particularly interested in working with data from existing administrative sources. Important considerations include: compensation, recruitment/retention, education/training, culturally-responsive care, quality improvement and expansion of peer supports.
Heidi Sulman, Doctoral student

Heidi Bruggink Sulman

Heidi Bruggink Sulman, MPH, MSW, LCSW is a PhD student studying behavioral health policy. She received an MPH in Health Law, Bioethics, and Human Rights from the Boston University School of Public Health; an MSW in Clinical Social Work and Behavioral Medicine from the Boston University School of Social Work; and an AB in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality from Harvard University. Ms. Sulman most recently served as a Program Manager at the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission. She is a National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism Pre-Doctoral Fellow and a past recipient of the Harvard Kennedy School Rappaport Institute Public Policy Fellowship. Her research interests include the financing and organization of behavioral health services, with particular focus on care integration, health insurance design, and provision of evidence-based practices.
Adam Vose-O'Neal

Adam Vose-O'Neal

For the last several years, licensed clinical social worker Adam Vose-O’Neal has worked in a clinical practice in Providence, R.I. where he specializes in treating clients with addictions. Now, Vose-O’Neal is enrolled in the Heller PhD program with a concentration in behavioral health, and is a National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) Fellow. He continues to treat clients in Providence, and hopes to maintain a clinical practice while pursuing a research career. For his dissertation research, he plans to pursue deeper questions of addiction, sobriety and social networks informed by his experience as a clinician.

“Something that’s come up in my practice is seeing how people get sober. One interesting thing is that they don’t always do it through conventional treatment. I’ve seen clients that disconnect or connect with people in their lives—change jobs, move, start a new relationship, get out of a relationship—and it’s had an impact on their path not just to sobriety, but sustained sobriety. That’s interesting to me. Not just how people get sober, but stay sober.”