Investigators

Principal Investigator

Erin M. Mobley

Erin M. Mobley Ph.D., M.P.H.

Assistant Professor, Department of Surgery
Specializes in Health Services Research

Erin M. Mobley, PhD, MPH, is an assistant professor at the University of Florida College of Medicine – Jacksonville. She serves within the division of general surgery and surgical oncology in the college’s department of surgery and is a member of the UF Health Cancer Center.

Dr. Mobley is a trained health services researcher who focuses on cancer control and survivorship among children, adolescents and young adults. Her research interests include access to care, insurance coverage, financial toxicity, employment and educational attainment, clinical trials, fertility concerns and other disparities experienced by cancer survivors.

Dr. Mobley received her doctorate in health services and policy from the University of Iowa and a master’s degree in public health and a bachelor’s degree from Florida State University. Prior to joining UF Health, she completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Center for Young Adult Cancer Survivorship Research at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine.

Co-investigators and Mentors

Stephen Anton

Stephen Anton Ph.D.

Professor
Chief, Division Of Clinical Research

Specializes in Psychology and Clinical Psychology
Dejana Braithwaite

Dejana Braithwaite Ph.D.

Professor
Associate Director for Cancer Population Sciences, UF Health Cancer Center

Dr. Braithwaite's research is focused on the intersection of cancer and aging, with the overarching goal of advancing and applying knowledge about aging to cancer population science. The overall goal is to encourage a more individualized approach to cancer screening and care among older adults.

Dr. Braithwaite has extensive experience, expertise, and leadership in large-scale multi-disciplinary NIH-funded efforts of breast and lung cancer screening, risk factors and outcomes, including the R01 Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium (BCSC), R01 Personalized Lung Cancer Screening Network (PLuS), P50 UCSF Breast Cancer SPORE and P30 UCSF Center for Aging in Diverse Communities. As PI or investigator on several of these grants, she has developed cohorts of individuals at risk for invasive cancer and developed comprehensive databases that include pathologic, clinical, biomarker, and risk factor data, as well as follow-up for subsequent disease and death. She has performed multiple epidemiologic studies where she was able to stratify older adults at risk for or diagnosed with cancer into distinct health categories associated with substantially different life expectancies. These studies have been cited by guideline panels, such as the American Cancer Society, the US Preventive Service Taskforce and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Currently, she leads two large multi-site projects that integrate longitudinal cohort data with simulation modeling to determine the benefits and harms of screening for breast and lung cancers in older adults across the levels of advancing age, comorbid conditions and functional status. This work is poised to inform precision screening policy and clinical decision making among older population subgroups for whom the net benefits of screening are currently highly uncertain.

Matthew Gurka

Matthew Gurka Ph.D.

Professor, Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics
Associate Chair of Education, University of Florida

Dr. Gurka is a Professor in the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics and the department’s Associate Chair of Education at the University of Florida. Hired as part of the University’s Preeminence Initiative, Dr. Gurka is also Associate Director of the Institute for Child Health Policy. Prior to his recent appointment at UF, Dr. Gurka was the Founding Chair of the Department of Biostatistics in the School of Public Health at West Virginia University, where he also led the Clinical Research Design, Epidemiology, and Biostatistics Program of the West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute (WVCTSI). Before his stay at WVU, Dr. Gurka was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences and Department of Pediatrics in the School of Medicine at the University of Virginia.

Dr. Gurka received a Ph.D. in biostatistics with an emphasis in epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has experience in a wide range of applications of biostatistics to medical research, from the design and analysis of observational studies to the coordination and analysis of multi center longitudinal studies. His research areas in statistics include longitudinal data analyses, mixed models, model selection, power analysis, and cluster randomized trials. He has published articles in renowned statistical journals regarding complexities associated with the use of linear mixed models, and he served on the Editorial Panel of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A. Collaboratively, he focuses primarily on child health research and currently serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Pediatrics.

Dr. Gurka has extensive collaborative and independent research experience in pediatrics. He has obtained funding from the NICHD to study the impact of chronic illnesses such as asthma on development and behavior in children and adolescents. Recently he has focused on childhood and adult obesity, specifically studying the metabolic syndrome. He has obtained NIH funding (NIDDK R21, NHLBI R01) to develop and validate tools to measure metabolic syndrome severity. Currently he is leading numerous maternal and child health studies at UF, including co-leading the Florida site of the recently funded HBCD study, a ten-year national cohort of pregnant women and their children to study brain development in early childhood.

Michael S. Gutter

Michael S. Gutter Ph.D.

Professor
Associate Dean for Extension and State Program Leader for 4-H Youth Development, Families & Communities

Associate Chair of Education, University of Florida

Dr. Michael Gutter is the Associate Dean for Extension - State Program Leader for 4-H Youth Development, Families and Communities for the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Florida. His BS is in Family Financial Management and his PhD is in Family Resource Management from The Ohio State University with a specialization in Finance. Gutter’s research focuses on examining how socioeconomic status, financial education, personal psychology, and financial socialization are related to financial behaviors. His outreach focuses on improving financial behaviors by increasing knowledge, skills, and access to services.

Gutter’s outreach projects include Managing in Tough Times, Florida Saves, Get Checking, Military Family Learning Network, and the Florida Master Money Mentor. His projects focus on enabling access to resources and services as well as improving people’s knowledge and understanding about family resource management. These projects have had funding from the Consumer Federation of America and Bank of America. He regularly tweets on personal finance topics under @mikegutter on Twitter.

My current research begins with the Behavioral Life Cycle Model and uses Behavioral Economics to explore key choices families make. My most recent work has focused on the role of information as influencers of decisions regarding mortgages, borrowing for education, and retirement decision making. We have used experimental design in an online setting to explore the role cognitive biases can have in the context of intertemporal resource allocation over the lifespan. Our results have suggestions for policies, additional research, and outreach education. All of the aforementioned issues have been shown to have substantial long term implications for economic well being for families but also have implications for society and the economy as a whole (e.g. some of the recent housing crisis). Current work is shifting into applying these concepts within the intersection of financial and healthcare decision making.

Jennifer Fishe

Jennifer Fishe M.D.

Assistant Professor
Associate Medical Director, Pediatric Emergency Medicine

Director, Center for Data Solutions

Jennifer N. Fishe, MD, is an assistant professor of emergency medicine, associate medical director for the Pediatric Emergency Department, and director of the Center for Data Solutions at the University of Florida College of Medicine – Jacksonville. Her research interests are pediatric prehospital care, particularly the treatment of asthma, and using data science to merge and optimize EMS and ED treatment. Dr. Fishe's research is currently funded by a K23 from the NHLBI, the UF CTSI Precision Medicine Program, and the R. Scott MacKenzie Foundation. She was the principal investigator on a retrospective study of pediatric prehospital and inter-facility transport patterns in Maryland, funded by The Falck Foundation and a co-investigator on a HRSA Targeted Issues Grant to develop a novel pediatric direct transport protocol (H34MC30232). She also has a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt in healthcare quality improvement (2017-Johns Hopkins). Dr. Fishe received her undergraduate degree in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her medical degree from the University of Miami. She completed her residency in general pediatrics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and her pediatric emergency medicine fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University.

Alexander S. Parker

Alexander S. Parker Ph.D.

Professor
Senior Associate Dean for Research

Data Team

Gerard Garvan

Gerard Garvan

Data Management Analyst I

Administrative Team

Jennifer Bowman

Jennifer Bowman MHA, MPH

Manager, Clinical Research
Yohan Diaz-Zuniga

Yohan Diaz-Zuniga CCRC

Clinical Research Coordinator
Jennifer Mull

Jennifer Mull MSN, RN, CCRC

Research Administrator
Brittney Roth Manning

Brittney Roth Manning MPH, CCRP

Associate Director, Clinical Research