Member Group: Community Engagement Core Leadership

Saria Lofton

ChicagoCHEC Role: Outreach Core Co-Lead
Organization: University of Illinois Chicago

Dr. Saria Lofton is an assistant professor in the College of Nursing at the University of Illinois Chicago. She is a health disparities nurse researcher deeply committed to research focused on health promotion in Black populations. Dr. Lofton explores the role of food is medicine efforts to address health inequities, food environments, and food sovereignty efforts to improve access to healthy foods for all communities. She has also received external funding, including the NIH, to develop a Food is Medicine intervention for Black women with hypertension and obesity and more recently, to expand this program to Black breast cancer survivors. 

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Masahito Jimbo

ChicagoCHEC Role: Principal Investigator, Outreach Core Co-Leader
Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago

Dr. Jimbo is a family physician researcher who has worked extensively in primary care practice quality improvement. Having worked in both urban and rural underserved areas, he has first-hand knowledge of how competing issues can crowd out important patient education during the patients’ visit with their physicians. Initially trained in basic laboratory research, he has obtained expertise in behavioral intervention and research through formal training in public health at the University of North Carolina and hands-on research to improve colorectal cancer screening at Thomas Jefferson University. He has obtained major funding from the National Cancer Institute to investigate patient and clinician communication utilizing decision aids and shared decision making, cancer screening and prevention in primary care, and clinician acceptance of practice interventions. He has worked extensively in the areas of inpatient medicine, guidelines development, population-based medicine, and faculty development. As the Department Head, Dr. Jimbo aims to continue the department’s excellence in all areas of academic family and community medicine.

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Keith Naylor

ChicagoCHEC Role: Outreach Core Co-Leader
Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago

Dr. Keith Naylor is a gastroenterologist and health services researcher in the Division of Gastroenterology & Hepatology at UI Health. Dr. Naylor’s major areas of interest include using administrative health data to investigate small-area variation in the utilization of endoscopic and non-endoscopic forms of colorectal cancer screening. His current research interests include defining colonoscopy-related geographic service areas using administrative data and examining the relationship between spatial proximity to colonoscopy infrastructure and the utilization of endoscopic and non-endoscopic screening modalities. He is particularly interested in exploring these factors among urban communities and within racial and ethnic minority population subgroups.

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Lisa Tussing-Humphreys

ChicagoCHEC Role: Outreach Core Co-Leader
Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago

Dr. Lisa Tussing-Humphreys is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Academic Internal Medicine and Geriatrics of the Department of Medicine in the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine. She is nutrition scientist and licensed registered dietitian and has been leading translational research studies and dietary/lifestyle intervention trials for over 8 years. The majority of her dietary/lifestyle intervention research has focused on reducing chronic disease health disparities in racial/ethnic minorities residing in both rural and urban settings.Dr. Tussing-Humphreys also has a personal interest in studying how obesity-related changes to systemic iron metabolism affects risk for colorectal cancer. Across all of her research, she applies epidemiologic, clinical, social, behavioral and molecular tools and assessments to understand complex diet/disease relationships.Her previous studies have laid the groundwork for her current American Cancer Society and National Cancer Institute R01 funded studies examining the impact of diet on colonic health and colon cancer risk. She oversees the collection of the individual-level structural violence related measures, analysis of the neuroendocrine and immune markers in her lab, and supervises the timely completion of lab work conducted by a multidisciplinary team of co-investigators and research core staff.As Director of the University of Illinois at Chicago Cancer Centers Diet and Behavior Shared Resource, she works closely with her Co-PI, Grippo, PhD, to determine the appropriate dietary composition of the diets for the animal study. Dr. Tussing-Humphreys serves as the administrative contact for the study and takes responsibility for the annual reports to NIH and communication with grants and contracts and UIC and UIUC.Her research is focused on environmental influences, lifestyle/dietary behaviors, gut microbial community and colorectal health.

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Jeanine Ntihirageza

ChicagoCHEC Role: Community Engagement Core Co-Leader
Organization: Northeastern Illinois University

Jeanine Ntihirageza is an Associate Professor at Northeastern Illinois University, and Department chair of Anthropology, ELP, Philosophy, and TESOL. She is a founding member of the African Summer Institute and the Genocide Research Group. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago.  While on a Fulbright Scholarship, she obtained an MA in Applied Linguistics from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Her BA in English Language and Literature is from the University of Burundi. Her current research interests are in Linguistics, Teaching English as Second Language, Refugee Studies and Genocide in Africa and the African Diaspora. Speaking Kirundi and French, she has been supporting the African refugee community for more than 15 years.

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Karriem Watson

ChicagoCHEC Role: Project Co-PI
Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago

Karriem Watson is the Administrative Director of Community Engaged Research at the UI Cancer Center. He has established himself as an exemplary project manager of community engaged research and manager of undergraduate STEM programs. He co-created a 10 week summer program for underrepresented minority students at UIC during his tenure as the Director of the Early Outreach Program (EOP) within the Urban Health Program (UHP). In 2013, he was recognized by the Chicago Urban League as an “Innovator in STEM”. Karriem is a product of the STEM pipeline programs of the UIC UHP and will use his expertise in project management and curriculum design as well as community engaged research to support the overall success of ChicagoCHEC’s training and educational initiatives.

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June McKoy

ChicagoCHEC Role: Outreach Core Co-Leader
Organization: Northwestern University

June McKoy is Director of Geriatric Oncology at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center and holds joint appointments as an Associate Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Preventive Medicine. She is the co-founder of the Senior Oncology Outcomes Advocacy and Research (SOAR) program at Lurie to address the disparate cancer burden borne by older individuals and their overall exclusion from cutting edge clinical cancer research and clinical trials. She has worked as a member of the Senior Adult Oncology Panel of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network to develop guidelines aimed at improving care and outcomes for older individuals. June is a strong advocate for the rule of law and the application of the law to protect human rights and advance social justice. She holds multiple degrees, including a MD from Southern Illinois University Medical School, MPH (with Delta Omega Honors) from University of Illinois Chicago, JD from Depaul University College of Law, a LLM (with honors) from Northwestern Law School, and a MBA from the Kellogg School of Management.

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Aida Giachello

ChicagoCHEC Role: Outreach Core Co-Leader
Organization: Northwestern University

Aida Giachello is Research Professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. For over 35 years, she has been conducting health and human services research, evaluating community interventions programs that impact individual families and community in the areas of chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, tobacco prevention and control, among others. In most of her efforts, she has used community based participatory action research and empowerment approaches which calls for the active involvement of community residents, leaders, health and human services providers, policy makers, and people directly affected by the health problem under study. Aida was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She has a bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences from the University of Puerto Rico, a master’s degree in Community Organizing and Policy from the School of Social Services Administration and a PhD in Sociology of Health and Illness or Medical Sociology from the University of Chicago.

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