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Editorial Board profiles


Editors-in-Chief

Gregory Aarons

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Gregory AaronsGregory Aarons, PhD is Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California San Diego, Co-Director of the Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute Dissemination and Implementation Science Center, and Director of the Child and Adolescent Services Research Center.  

Dr Aarons’ research has been funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the W.T. Grant Foundation. His work focuses on identifying and improving system, organizational, and individual factors that impact implementation and sustainment of evidence-based practices, use of research evidence, and quality of care in health care and public sector allied health practice settings. Dr. Aarons has developed implementation frameworks, community-engaged implementation and scale-up strategies, and pragmatic measures. Dr Aarons works with collaborators on implementation projects in the United States, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and Australia.  

Dr Aarons joined the Implementation Science editorial team as an Associate Editor in 2009 and  served in that role until transitioning to Co-Editor-in-Chief in 2022.

Paul Wilson

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Paul Wilson is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Primary Care and Health Services Research, University of Manchester and Implementation Science research theme lead for the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration Greater Manchester.

Paul has a background in evidence synthesis with research interests that are focused around evidence informed decision making in health policy and practice. His interests include rapid review methodologies, the development and evaluation of methods to increase the uptake of research based knowledge to inform decisions relating to service delivery, redesign, disinvestment, and the evaluation of service innovation in health systems.

Protocols Editor

Alison Hutchinson

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Alison HutchinsonAlison Hutchinson is a Registered Nurse and holds a Doctor of Philosophy from The University of Melbourne, a Master of Bioethics from Monash University and a Bachelor of Applied Science (Advanced Nursing) from La Trobe University, Australia. She is Chair in Nursing and Director of the Centre for Quality and Patient Research – Monash Health Partnership, and Professor of Nursing at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. She has the distinction of being one of only a few Australian nurses to have successfully completed a formal postdoctoral fellowship program overseas.

Supported by awards from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research (now Alberta Innovates), Professor Hutchinson completed her fellowship in the Knowledge Utilization Studies Program at the University of Alberta, Canada, during 2007 to 2009. Professor Hutchinson has attracted competitive research funding from Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council, Australia and the Department of Health and Aging, Australia. She also serves on the board of a not-for-profit aged care organization.

She has worked in a variety of clinical, management, education and research roles across a range of public, private and tertiary health care settings. Her primary research interests center on improving care through the translation of research evidence into clinical practice and care of the older person.

Associate Editors

Rinad Beidas

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New Content ItemRinad Beidas, PhD, is Chair and Ralph Seal Paffenbarger Professor of Medical Social Sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. Her previous role was Director of the Penn Medicine Nudge Unit; Founding Director of the Penn Implementation Science Center at the Leonard Davis Institute; Associate Director at the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics, Associate Professor of Psychiatry; Medical Ethics and Health Policy, and Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Rinad received her Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology from Colgate University and a Doctorate of Philosophy in psychology from Temple University.

Her research is designed to draw on insights from behavioral economics and implementation science to make it easier for clinicians, leaders, and organizations to use best practices to improve the quality of care provided to patients and to improve health outcomes equitably. Broadly, her work entails three primary foci: 1) understanding the context in which individuals will implement evidence-based practices, 2) developing implementation approaches that target the factors that may accelerate or hinder implementation, and 3) conducting pragmatic trials to test these implementation approaches. She does this work across disease areas (e.g., mental health, cancer, HIV) and collaborates closely with key stakeholders, including patients, clinicians, health system leaders, payers, and policy-makers.

Signe Flottorp

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Signe FlottorpSigne Flottorp is a senior researcher at the Division for Health Services at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, and professor at the Department of Health Management and Health Economics, Institute of Health and Society at the University of Oslo. 

Signe is a GP and has worked in primary care for more than 30 years, though she left clinical practice in 2013. Since 1994, she has mainly focused on health services research exploring how to support informed decisions in health care. She has been involved in several projects both to conduct and improve methods for systematic reviews, guideline development and implementation research. She is among the founding members of the GRADE working group, and a member of the editorial team of the Effective Practice and Organisation of Care (EPOC) Group in Cochrane.

Sarah Gimbel

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New Content ItemSarah Gimbel, a Professor in the Department of Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing, co-directs the Center for Global Health Nursing, and holds an adjunct appointment in the Department of Global Health, all at the University of Washington. She is an established implementation researcher with extensive experience leading complex, multi-country implementation research studies in low and middle-income countries (LIMC), including Kenya, Mozambique and Peru. Her research expertise includes the development and testing of interventions to strengthen health systems and improve the reach and quality of health services. She has ongoing projects in Mozambique, Kenya, Peru, and Washington State and works in the areas of HIV/AIDS, hypertension, neglected tropical diseases and primary health care.

Jonathan Purtle

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New Content ItemJonathan Purtle is Associate Professor of Public Health Policy & Management and Director of Policy Research at NYU’s Global Center for Implementation Science. He is an implementation scientist whose research focuses on mental health policy. His work examines questions such as how research evidence can be most effectively communicated to policymakers and is used in policymaking processes, how social and political contexts affect policymaking and policy implementation, and how the implementation of policies “on the books” can be improved in practice. He is also interested in population-based approaches to mental health and how mental health can be integrated in to mainstream public health practice.

Heather Schacht Reisinger

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New Content ItemHeather Schacht Reisinger, PhD is Associate Director of Engagement, Integration, and Implementation at University of Iowa’s Institute for Clinical and Translational Science (ICTS) and an Associate Professor of General Internal Medicine Division at University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. She is also a Core Investigator at the Center for Access and Delivery Research and Evaluation (CADRE) at the Iowa City Department of Veterans Affairs Health Care System. Dr. Reisinger is a medical anthropologist who also completed post-doctoral work in epidemiology and biostatistics. Her areas of expertise include ethnography, qualitative methods, and mixed methods; telemedicine; rural health; and infection prevention and control. Her background in anthropological methods prepared her well to work with interdisciplinary teams to study how healthcare systems can most effectively improve access and patient safety. 
 

Laura Sheard

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New Content ItemLaura Sheard is an Associate Professor in the department of Health Sciences at the University of York and Honorary Principal Research Fellow at Bradford Institute for Health Research, UK.

She is a qualitative methodologist, health sociologist and applied health services/public health researcher.  She is particularly interested in innovation and novelty in qualitative analytic techniques. As a methodologist, her research interests are broad but tend to concentrate on prison healthcare, health inequalities, quality improvement, quality of healthcare and patient safety/experience.

Laura is interested in the structural and organisational reasons why interventions succeed or fail, alongside understanding how the autonomy and empowerment of healthcare staff influences implementation. She has extensive experience of leading mixed methods evaluations of complex interventions delivered in the NHS.  

Justin D. (J.D.) Smith

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New Content ItemJD Smith, PhD is Associate Professor in the University of Utah Intermountain Healthcare Department of Population Health Sciences in the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine at the University of Utah, Director of the Dissemination and Implementation Science Core (DISC) of the Utah Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. Previously, JD was Associate Professor in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University where he was Associate Director of the NIDA-funded Center for Prevention Implementation Methodology for Drug Abuse and HIV and Co-Director of the Program in Dissemination and Implementation Science in the Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute.

JD leads the implementation science activities of studies focused on evidence-based interventions and guidelines for adult and pediatric obesity, hypertension, cancer prevention, control, and survivorship, mental health, HIV, and other conditions, delivered in primary healthcare systems, community-based organizations, and other systems. His research has been funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and foundations. Dr. Smith’s interests focus on the development and application of innovative methods for implementation research, including models and frameworks, study designs, implementation strategy tracking, and pragmatic measurement and evaluation. He is the co-developer of the Implementation Research Logic Model (IRLM), the Longitudinal Implementation Strategies Tracking System (LISTS), the Roll-Out Implementation Optimization (ROIO) design, and other methods. 

Janet Squires

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Janet SquiresJanet Squires is a Senior Scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute and Associate Professor in the School of Nursing, Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Ottawa.

Dr Squires’ research is primarily focused on improving knowledge translation by health care professionals through the design, implementation, and evaluation of theory-informed and context-optimized interventions aimed to improve healthcare professionals’ use of research and research-based behaviors, to contribute to improved patient and system outcomes. 

She is currently involved in several nationally funded projects examining the role of context in knowledge translation and changing health care professional behaviors and in developing and testing interventions to improve knowledge translation by health care professionals across multiple settings.

Sharon Straus

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Sharon StrausSharon E. Straus is a geriatrician and clinical epidemiologist. She is Director of the Knowledge Translation Program at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute and Deputy Physician in Chief at St. Michael's Hospital and Director, Division of Geriatric Medicine; Vice Chair, Mentorship, Equity and Diversity; and Professor, Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto.

Sharon also holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Knowledge Translation.

Michel Wensing

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Michel Wensing has a broad interest in primary healthcare and implementation science in health. He is full professor and head of a master of science programme for health services research and implementation science at Heidelberg University, Germany. He is also deputy head of the Department of General Practice and Health Services Research at Heidelberg University Hospital. After receiving degrees in sociology and the medical sciences, he conducted research on the implementation of clinical guidelines, the organisation of ambulatory healthcare, and patients' perspectives on healthcare.

Michel Wensing has been a member of the Implementation Science editorial team since the journal started in 2006 and was co-Editor-in-Chief from 2012 until 2022.  He is also an Associate Editor for Implementation Science Communications since 2023.

Editorial Board

Rebecca Armstrong

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Rebecca Armstrong is the Executive Manager of Knowledge Translation & Impact at the Australian Institute for Family Studies, and has an appointment at the University of Melbourne where she is Director of Public Health Insight and the joint Co-ordinating Editor of Cochrane Public Health. Rebecca is a public health researcher with more than 10 years experience developing and evaluating knowledge translation projects. Rebecca holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne where she led the development of a cluster RCT in local government exploring the effectiveness of KT strategies. This work has informed a series of initiatives focused on facilitating evidence-informed public health practice for practitioners including the development of short courses and an evaluation of a large-scale KT platform for obesity prevention practitioners. Rebecca and her team have also developed a program of work to support researchers to develop KT plans. They have been working with research teams to develop KT plans and have developed a successful short course to build research capacity in this area.

Rebecca’s current roles focus on supporting researchers to develop and evaluate their own KT efforts and the development of products, including systematic reviews, to facilitate evidence-informed public health. At AIFS Rebecca is overseeing the development and implementation of an agency-wide KT strategy to support policy and practice in the social services sector.

Justin Presseau

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Justin PresseauJustin Presseau is a Scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute and Assistant Professor in the School of Epidemiology, Public Health and Preventive Medicine at the University of Ottawa. 

Justin’s research focuses on behavior change as it applies to health, drawing upon and developing behavior change theory and methods to understand behavior, to develop and evaluate interventions, and to synthesize evidence of interventions focused on changing healthcare professional behaviors and health behaviors of patients and the public.

Anne Sales

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Anne Sales is a nurse and Professor in the Sinclair School of Nursing and the Department of Family and Community Medicine in the School of Medicine at the University of Missouri (Columbia), and she is the Associate Dean for Implementation Research and Health Delivery Effectiveness in the School of Medicine. She is also a Research Scientist at the Center for Clinical Management Research at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System.

Her training is in nursing, sociology, health economics, econometrics, and general health services research.  Her work involves theory-based design of implementation interventions, including understanding how feedback reports affect provider behavior and through behavior change have an impact on patient outcomes; the role of social networks in implementation interventions; and effective implementation methods using electronic health records and digital interventions. She has completed over 40 funded research projects, many focused on implementation research. She was co-Editor-in-Chief of Implementation Science 2012-2019 and is a founding co-Editor-in-Chief of Implementation Science Communications.

Bryan Weiner

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Bryan WeinerBryan Weiner is Professor in the Departments of Global Health and Health Services at the University of Washington. He directs the Implementation Science Program in the Department of Global Health and serves as the Strategic Hire in Implementation Science for the School of Public Health.

An organizational psychologist by training, Bryan’s research focuses on the adoption, implementation, and sustainment of innovations and evidence-based practices in health care organizations. Over the past 20 years, he has examined a wide range of innovations including quality improvement practices, care management practices, patient safety practices, clinical information systems, and as well evidence-based clinical practices in cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. His research has advanced implementation science by creating new knowledge about the organizational determinants of effective implementation, introducing and developing new theories, and improving the state of measurement in the field.