Leadership

Elliot Friedman, Co-Director

Dr. Elliot Friedman is an Associate Scientist in the Department of Population Health Sciences and the Institute on Aging at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Co-Director of BioPop: Integrative Biopsychosocial Research in Population Health. He holds a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BA in Psychology from Columbia University. Dr. Friedman completed postdoctoral training in Neuroimmunology at the University of California, San Diego and was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at UW-Madison.

Dr. Friedman’s research interests lie at the interface of health-related biological processes, psychological functioning, and social structure, particularly the ways in which social environments and psychological experiences “get under the skin” to increase or decrease the risk of disease across the lifespan. Dr. Friedman’s research draws on theory and data from a number of academic disciplines – psychology, immunology, neuroscience, epidemiology, and sociology – and involves collaborations with many scientists from the UW and elsewhere.

Ongoing projects include the following:

  • Examining the ways in which positive and negative psychological functioning are associated with the accumulation of inflammatory proteins in the blood with age. This work focuses on a national sample of middle-aged and older adults and is supported by the National Institute on Aging.
  • Examining the links between socioeconomic status and circulating levels of inflammatory proteins as well as the behavioral and psychosocial variables that may explain these links.
  • Determining the relationships among daily events (e.g. stressors), psychosocial functioning, and systemic inflammation. This collaborative work focuses on the ways in which the stuff of daily life (rather than profound but less frequent experiences) relates to healthy or unhealthy profiles of disease-related biomarkers and health outcomes.
  • Understanding how psychosocial processes and inflammatory proteins may contribute to the onset and development of Alzheimer’s disease. This work is being done in collaboration with scientists in the Alzheimer’s Research Institute at UW-Madison.
  • Links between sleep and health with a particular interest in the ways in which psychosocial factors affect sleep quality and the consequences of impaired sleep for biomarkers of disease. This work involves several collaborations at UW-Madison and other institutions around the US.

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Whitney P. Witt, Co-Director

Dr. Whitney P. Witt is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences at the School of Medicine and Public Health at University of Wisconsin, Madison and the Co-Director of BioPop: Integrative Biopsychosocial Research in Population Health. She holds a PhD in health services research and a MPH from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a BA in women's studies and law from Hampshire College. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School in the Pediatric Health Services Research Program at the MassGeneral Hospital for Children. Prior to her current position, Dr. Witt served as an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine and the Acting Director of the Section on Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Buehler Center on Aging.

Dr. Witt brings an interdisciplinary approach to studying the social, behavioral, and psychological factors that contribute to human development and disparities in family health and well-being across the lifespan. Her research addresses how familial relationships influence health behaviors, health and mental health status, and healthcare services use of individuals over time. Moreover, the goal of her research is to understand the physiological, behavioral, and social pathways by which health perceptions affect the health and healthcare use of family members and individuals living with illness.

She is currently exploring three primary lines of research: 1) the impact of childhood illness on the family; 2) maternal mental health and the impact on long-term health behaviors, health, and economic outcomes of mothers and children; 3) psychobiology of family caregiving across the lifespan. Dr. Witt is building a research program to examine mind-body interactions and how such interactions may help explain health disparities within and between families. Together, this information will help in constructing effective interventions for these families to improve patient health outcomes, reduce health inequalities, and address family burden.

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Carissa Gottlieb, Program Coordinator

Carissa Gottlieb is a second year graduate student in the Department of Population Health Sciences and will complete her Masters degree in the summer of 2008. Ms. Gottlieb received her Bachelors of Arts in Psychology – with a concentration in biological psychology – from Bates College in 2002, where she completed an honors thesis investigating the effects of sex hormones on spatial memory in a rat model. As a graduate student she has been involved in a variety of projects through her work at the University of Wisconsin’s Population Health Institute, and with Drs. Maureen Durkin and Whitney Witt.

As the topic of her thesis, Ms. Gottlieb is currently involved in a collaborative project with UNICEF which aims to estimate the prevalence of child disability in 22 developing countries. Additionally, she is a key collaborator on a project examining childhood activity limitations and their impacts on child and parental health, mental health, and role functioning.

Ms. Gottlieb is one of the founders and part of the core leadership in BioPop: Integrative Biopsychosocial Research in Population Health. As such, she coordinates several of the ongoing research studies in the BioPop group. Specifically, she is the Project Director of a primary data collection study which examines the psychobiology of caring for a child with cancer, funded under the grant entitled “Interactions between Childhood Illness and the Family”. Other projects include the impact of stress and stress-reducing behavior on health and mental health; the relationship between antepartum mental health and outcomes in pregnancy, child and maternal health; and studies examining the cellular impact of stress in caregivers.

Ms. Gottlieb’s research interests are broadly in maternal and child health and global health, with a particular interest in childhood disability and mental health, including the effects (and mechanisms of effect) that these conditions have on family health outcomes.

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