Dr. Cacari Stone has dedicated over 30 years of population health science aimed at advancing health equity fordiverse racial, under-resourced, rural and Latinx and immigrant populations. She brings “real-life” experience to understanding health and disease as a former licensed behavioral health provider, director for a home visiting child welfare program, director of senior services, executive director of a rural federally qualified mental health clinic, state health officer and federal women’s health liaison with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Currently, she is the founding Director and Principle Investigator for a National Research Center of Excellence funded by the National Institutes of Health (Transdisciplinary Research, Equity and Engagement Center). She leads the TREE Center in building team science in testing multi-level interventions with a total of 33 faculty (PI's, co-I's, mentors), 20 minority graduate students and 6 staff from 17 Departments/Colleges/Schools. Lisa has received special acknowledgment for her ability to build multi-disciplinary research teams and convene diverse stakeholders in testing interventions that bridge primary care with community health interventions. Her scholarly portfolio is comprised of over $20 million in grants from private and public funders and encompasses the macro-level determinants of health (e.g. health reform, immigration policies), to the community level (e.g.Tool for Health and Resilience in Vulnerable Environments in frontier border communities), to the interpersonal level (e.g. role of promotores de salud in bridging patient-provider communications). She has written multiple articles (i.e. Health Affairs, American Journal of Public Health, Academic Medicine) and policy reports and delivered over 100 research presentations to academic, community and policy audiences at the national, binational and state/local levels.
She received her doctorate in health and social policy at The Heller School, Brandeis University and completed her post-doctoral training in the social determinants of health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and served as a fellow with the late Senator Ted Kennedy and was the recipient of a policy leadership award with the the Kaiser Permanente Burch Minority Leadership Development Program.
