Center to Improve Veteran Involvement in Care (CIVIC)

Qian Leng, MD, MPH

Fellowship Period: 2021 - present

Fellowship Track: Independent Investigator

Dr. Qian (pronounced "chee-an") Leng is a board-certified internal medicine physician who completed her MD/MPH at Harvard University and her residency at Oregon Health and Science University. She has been a practicing hospitalist for the past 8 years. She has worked at Kaiser and Legacy Health as a teaching attending.

Professional Interests and Goals: Qian is interested in yoga and mindfulness research. She is also passionate about prenatal health and alleviating health disparities. Qian has been a yoga and meditation teacher for 13 years. She would like to do research that addresses mental and physical wellbeing from a holistic perspective. Qian is also trained as an acupuncturist. She is not sure yet if she would like to focus on research and become a PI one day versus incorporating research into her clinical career. Mentoring medical students is also an important aspect of her work.

Why did you apply to the Fellowship with CIVIC?

Qian applied to the HSR&D Fellowship with CIVIC to be able to research how to improve the way that health care is delivered, especially in terms of using nonpharmacologic ways to improve health. She was also the advisor to the case management department at Legacy and would like to research ways to improve the delivery of hospital medicine and coordination of care for discharged patients./p>

What have you gained from the program so far?

Qian has been learning how to work with data sets and conducting qualitative research. She has been networking with various researchers at the VA and OHSU who are doing wonderful work in the areas that she is interested in and it excited to become involved in these projects.

What projects are you or will you be working on?

"I will be looking at dyad outcomes for partners of patients with lung cancer who underwent a pilot study of yoga as an intervention for improving mental wellbeing and physical limitations with Dr. Don Sullivan. I will also be researching the outcomes of home-based primary care at the VA with Dr. Sam Edwards. A third project I will be working on is investigating the relationship between prenatal mental health outcomes and the provisions of mental health support for BIPOC pregnant people with Dr. Alice Graham."

Abby Mulcahy, PhD, MPH

Fellowship Period: 2021 - present

Fellowship Track: Independent Investigator

Dr. Abby Mulcahy is an Office of Academic Affiliations Health Services Research & Development and AcademyHealth Delivery System Science fellow at the Center to Improve Veteran Involvement in Care at the VA Portland Health Care System.
Dr. Mulcahy completed their PhD in Public Health at Oregon State University in 2021 with a graduate minor in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Dr. Mulcahy received the S. Marie Harvey Sexuality and Reproductive Health Fellowship to complete their dissertation.
During their doctoral training, Dr. Mulcahy was an instructor of record in public health courses, including Introduction to the US Healthcare System and Introduction to US Health Policy, and on the leadership team for the Human Services Resource Center. In addition, Dr. Mulcahy worked as a graduate research assistant under Dr. Megan Cahn at the Legacy Research Institute and as the executive director of the Corvallis Multicultural Literacy Center.
Dr. Mulcahy holds a BA in political science from the University of Wyoming and an MPH in public health policy and management from Texas A&M University.

Professional Interests and Goals: "My research interests center around three nodes - gender, disability, and aging. I am particularly interested in where these overlap (as well as other multiple-minority groups), healthcare needs, health care use, and resilience.
My goal is to employ a positive deviance framework to identify what tools/strategies/resources make members of multiply-minoritized groups successful and to re-engineer these to improve health equity overall. The VA is the ideal place to do this work due to the volume of longitudinal data available and mentorship opportunities available with researchers already doing this work."

Why did you apply to the Fellowship with CIVIC?

"I applied to join CIVIC, in part, because joining the VA system is a homecoming of sorts. My father served in the United States Air Force. After he retired, my mother became a civil servant. I grew up on military bases, surrounded by servicemembers, Veterans, and their families. Joining CIVIC was a way for me to give back to them using my training in health services research."

What projects are you or will you be working on?

I anticipate working on projects related to suicide prevention, sexual and reproductive health, and aging, as well as charactertistics and health care use of Veterans, Veteran VA users and non-users, and non-Veterans (civilians).

AnnaMarie O'Neill, PhD

Fellowship Period: 2022 - present

Fellowship Track: Independent Investigator

Dr. AnnaMarie O'Neill completed her Ph.D. in Applied Psychology with an emphasis in Social Psychology at Portland State University in 2022. Her research has been unified by her passion for understanding social determinants of health (like interpersonal relationships, workplace policies, social inequality). In addition to observational research, she has conducted field experiments to find the most effective workplace interventions aimed at promoting the health and well-being of military employees and their loved ones. In 2020, she worked as a summer associate at the RAND Corporation to bolster the Department of Defense's organizational capacity to prevent military sexual assault as well as to foster an ongoing method to learn about the needs of Army spouses through panel surveys. Throughout her career, she has trained other researchers in statistics such as meta-analysis while she worked as a Psychiatric Research Assistant at the University of Nevada School of Medicine and dyadic intervention analysis (i.e., evaluating an intervention on a linked pair like a couple) during her graduate program at Portland State University. Her volunteer work has included helping callers at the Crisis Call Center by providing immediate crisis intervention, suicide prevention, and child protection referrals.

Professional Interests and Goals: Dr. O'Neill's research interests are focused on two lines of research: 1. Preventing firearm injury and suicide through scalable interventions and 2. Developing more holistic treatments for chronic health problems (particularly chronic pain) that incorporates couple-level intervention components. Her overarching goals are to prevent firearm injury and suicide and to ameliorate chronic health conditions by leveraging close relationships, which play a major role in shaping health and well-being. Veterans are disproportionately affected by these problems and new strategies to address them are needed.

Why did you apply to the Fellowship with CIVIC?

"I was drawn to the fellowship with CIVIC because I am passionate about the research being conducted at CIVIC and I wanted to learn from the incredible investigators here. I wanted to do impactful research that protects and promotes the health of Veterans and their loved ones."

What do you hope to gain from the Fellowship?

"I want to grow as a researcher. Specifically, I wanted to further develop my quantitative and qualitative methods skills to truly become a mixed methodologist, learn more about barriers to care for marginalized populations and how to address them, gain experience in designing scaleable interventions, and cultivate a network of investigators who I can learn from and collaborate with."

What projects are you or will you be working on?

"I am working with Dr. Carlson on designing social interventions to prevent firearm injury and suicide of rural Veterans. I anticipate working on other projects related to suicide, trauma, chronic health conditions, well-being, gender, and barriers to accessing health care."