Current Fellows
Senait Tekle, PhD
Senait is pursuing her post-doctoral training through the George Washington University (GW) Primary Care Research Program (P-CART). She holds a PhD in Prevention Science from Washington State University - an interdisciplinary program focused on study design, implementation, evaluation, and dissemination of prevention programs. Her research interests primarily address wellness, health promotion, and disease prevention. Senait’s P-CART project
focuses on improving the outcomes of traumatic brain injury (TBI) in Veterans and identifying the barriers and facilitators in using complementary and integrative health (CIH) treatments. This is a mixed-method research project involving EHR data, focus groups, and interviews to improve TBI outcomes in Veterans. Senait enjoys listening to audiobooks, music and traveling in her free time.
Meredith Norwood, OTD, MOT, OTR/L
Meredith earned her Master’s of Occupational Therapy from Saint Louis University and has been a practicing pediatric occupational therapist since 2017. During her clinical practice, she developed a special interest for helping children and their families who suffer from chronic pain. She earned her post-professional Doctorate of Occupational Therapy from George Washington University in 2021 and joined the Primary Care Research Program (P-CART) at George Washington University in 2022. She will be partnering with Children’s National Hospital’s Pain Medicine team throughout the P-CART program to study the correlation between objective pain measurement and the child’s functional level to improve clinical pain evaluation and treatment.
Neil Mittal, MD, PhD
Neil received his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2021 and is now a post-doctoral researcher with George Washington University's Biomedical Informatics Center through the Primary Care Research Program (P-CART). He has a broad background in translational research, across clinical medicine, engineering design, computational modeling, and statistical analysis, with a long-term focus on improving the options for patient care and medical practice. He plans to apply data science techniques and genomics-related research to investigate the impact of commercial determinants of health.
Alumni
Abigail Haenssler, PhD
Abigail received her PhD from East Carolina University in 2021. Her previous
research focused on using MRI to study anatomical variations in individuals with cleft palate and speech and surgical outcomes. Dr. Haenssler also worked clinically, treating individuals with speech and resonance disorders associated with velopharyngeal dysfunction. Dr. Haenssler’s research interests include speech acoustics, motor control of speech, resonance disorders, craniofacial anomalies, and velopharyngeal dysfunction. Dr. Haenssler’s current work focuses on understanding the underlying mechanisms of speech impairment for individuals with ALS and their impact on communication participation.
Ava Williams, DNP, MS, MSN, CRNP, FNP-BC
Ava has ten years of clinical nursing experience and has served in various nursing roles, including research, inpatient care, public health, management, quality improvement, and regulatory positions. She earned her MSN and DNP from George Washington University. Her career goal is to improve access to care in underserved/vulnerable communities. She aspires to influence the field of nursing through scholarship, leadership, and research. Ava's current research project involves designing a telehealth medication management and reconciliation study to address polypharmacy, patient safety, and person-centered communication for community-dwelling seniors under treatment for diabetes, metabolic disorders, and cardiovascular disease —to improve care, shared decision making, quality of life, and disease control. Ava loves to travel, and her favorite place to travel to is the Caribbean.
Luke Lindemann, PhD
Luke Lindemann received his PhD in Linguistics from Yale University in 2019. His research interest is in characterizing patterns of speech variation in order to understand the causes of miscommunication in healthcare encounters. He is currently a member of the Advanced Metrics Laboratory, in which he studies communication and decision-making in complex healthcare encounters. These include interactions that involve individuals in disordered states of consciousness, and interactions with individuals that require the services of a language interpreter.