Senior Scientist and ARG Scientific Director, William (Bill) C. Kerr, PhD, is Director of ARG’s National Alcohol Research Center and Co-Directs the National Alcohol Survey and the Health Disparities projects. Dr. Kerr received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California-Davis (1997). From 1997 to 2001 Bill served as the Project Director of the Collaborative Alcohol Related Longitudinal Project in the Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences at UCSF before joining ARG. He is recognized for his studies of alcohol measurement methods, age-period-cohort studies on drinking pattern trends, and mortality studies, including a successfully completed NIAAA R01 on Alcohol Consumption and Mortality in the US 1950-2000. He conducted detailed studies of home and bar drinks in the 2006-10 Center’s Methodological Studies Component and is leading analyses on trends, subjective impairment, injury risk and other topics in the current Center’s Epidemiological Analyses of the NAS component. He is currently the PI of an R01 study of the privatization of the Washington state liquor monopoly in 2012, which will also investigate the impacts of marijuana legalization, and an R01 study of life-course alcohol use patterns and health outcomes, which builds on his program of alcohol-related health outcome studies emphasizing the importance of detailed alcohol pattern measurement. He is also currently a co-investigator in an R01 project on the impact of the 2008-9 recession on alcohol-related suicides and disparities in such effects. Dr. Kerr is an Assistant Editor of Addiction, serves on the editorial board of Contemporary Drug Problems and on the National Alcohol Beverage Control Association (NABCA) Public Health Advisory Board.
Senior Scientist Nina Mulia, DrPH, is Center Associate Director and Director of Alcohol Services. She specializes in and has published widely on racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in heavy drinking, alcohol problems, and alcohol services utilization. She has been PI of four NIAAA grants investigating alcohol-related disparities, and involving analyses of large national data sets such as the NAS, NESARC and NLSY. These include her current study of heavy drinking over the life course from adolescence to middle age (R01 AA022668), a study to explain racial/ethnic disparities in heavy drinking and alcohol problems that examines multilevel risk and protective factors (R01 AA020474, M-PI with S. Zemore), a study of disparities in access to alcohol services, and an early study examining race/ethnicity, social stressors such as poverty and discrimination, and alcohol use and problems (R21 AA015397).
Won Kim Cook, PhD, is a scientist and co-directs the Center’s Health Disparities Project investigating disparities in alcohol consumption and other health risk behaviors after the onset of cancers and cardiovascular-related conditions. Much of Dr. Cook’s epidemiologic research has been grounded in the health disparities paradigm. In a series of NIAAA-funded studies she has investigated individual-level and environmental predictors of drinking and other health risk behaviors, related chronic health conditions, and healthcare access, primarily among Asian Americans but in other racial/ethnic groups as well, identifying socioeconomic and cultural subgroups at high risk of alcohol-related disparities. Her current research also includes a project, also supported by NIAAA, on the risk relationships among harmful drinking, its clustering with other lifestyle risk factors (obesity, physical inactivity, and smoking), and cardiovascular-related chronic conditions in Asian American adults, and moderation of these relationships by alcohol metabolizing genes, aldehyde dehydrogenase ALDH2*2 and alcohol dehydrogenase ADH1B*2. She has also published on alcohol policy and alcohol’s harms to others, in part investigating cultural conditions that may influence policy effects on drinking and related harms. Dr. Cook serves on the Editorial Board of BMC Public Health, handling manuscripts on drinking and other health risk behaviors and interventions to address them, alcohol policies, and health care access and utilization for disadvantaged populations around the world.
Thomas K. Greenfield, PhD, is a senior scientist and former scientific director, and currently co-directs the Statistics and Data Services Core along with biostatistician Libo Li. Dr. Greenfield also co-directs the High-Intensity Drinking project with its lead, Camillia Lui. Previously he served on NIAAA’s Extramural Advisory Board, and was a member of its Health Services Research IRG (then AA2), and CSR’s Community Influences on Health Behavior IRG. Tom currently serves on the board of Alcohol Justice. Recent projects he led included Alcohol’s Harms to Others Among US Adults (Greenfield & Karriker-Jaffe, M-PIs) and a multinational equivalent grant, R01 023870 (GENAHTO; Greenfield, S. Wilsnack & Bloomfield, M-PIs). He recently completed a subaward from BrightOutcome, Inc. for a Phase 2 SBIR entitled ‘SHARE: Simplifying Human Subjects Data Sharing for Alcohol Researchers’. Dr. Greenfield serves as a Field Editor for Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, and is on the editorial advisory board for the International Journal for Environmental Research on Public Health. In 2019 he was co-winner of the Jellinek Memorial Prize for Alcohol Studies.
Libo Li, PhD, co-directs the Statistics and Data Services Core. He completed his doctoral work at the University of California, Los Angeles where he studied measurement and psychometrics. He has extensive experience in methodological development and evaluation of advanced models for social and behavioral research (e.g., competing risk survival analysis, structural equation modeling, generalized linear mixed modeling, multilevel modeling, and marginal structural modeling), traditional and item response theory approaches to measurement, and application of new methods to data analysis (e.g., investigation of recovery from illicit drug abuse using recurrent event analysis).
Camillia K. Lui, PhD, is a scientist and co-directs the High-Intensity Drinking project. Applying a life course perspective, her research centers on understanding and addressing the social inequities in risky alcohol and tobacco use among adolescents and young adults and the contexts in which these behaviors occur. Dr. Lui utilizes a social epidemiological approach using general population, longitudinal survey, and administrative data in addition to a mixed methods approach driven by participatory research. She is currently Principal Investigator for a TRDRP-funded New Investigator Award to examine smoke-free policies in California community colleges and Co-Investigator on NIAAA research studies examining racial/ethnic and educational disparities in alcohol use across the life course. With Special Service for Groups, Inc, she is part of the Asian Pacific Islander Technical Assistance Provider team for the California Reducing Disparities Project. Previously she has served as an evaluation consultant for community organizations serving racial/ethnic minority communities. She completed a doctorate in Community Health Sciences and a dual master’s degree in Public Health and Asian American Studies, all from UCLA.
Scientist Priscilla Martinez, PhD, co-directs the Center’s National Alcohol Surveys: Advancing Epidemiologic Analyses of 21st Century Drinking project. She is also the Principal Investigator of a NIAAA K01 award investigating racial/ethnic disparities in alcohol-related conditions of depression, hypertension, and diabetes via the role of inflammation. She received funding from the California Breast Cancer Research Program (CBCRP) to lead the Drink Less for Your Breasts project, the first US-based campaign to inform young women that alcohol use is a risk factor for breast cancer. As a lecturer at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley she has taught survey research methods and has conducted methodological work focused on survey data collection among racial/ethnic communities. Dr. Martinez’s research explores relationships between immune function, health, and alcohol use to address alcohol-related health disparities in the US. Her work also examines ways to improve participation of racial/ethnic minorities in alcohol research collecting biological samples. She received her MPhil in International Community Health and a Ph.D. in Addiction Research, both from the University of Oslo, Norway. She also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley in partnership with the Alcohol Research Group.
