Alison Herrmann
Alison K. Herrmann, PhD is Associate Director of the UCLA Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Equity (Equity Center) and Research Scientist at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. She is also Co-Director of Community Outreach and Engagement (COE) in the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. In these roles, she is responsible for identifying and facilitating opportunities to engage faculty and community stakeholders, designing and delivering training and capacity building activities to increase community partners’ ability to use evidence-based approaches, and for providing technical assistance, oversight and quality control monitoring for community-based research projects conducted in a variety of settings including clinics, schools, churches and worksites.
Dr. Herrmann is a health services researcher with a background and training in psychology. Her primary interest is in the design, implementation and evaluation of sustainable, systems-based interventions to improve health behaviors and mitigate chronic disease disparities among diverse population groups. She is deeply committed to developing and sustaining robust and equitable partnerships with community members and organizations across societal sectors in this work. Dr. Herrmann currently serves as an investigator on community-partnered health disparities intervention research projects aimed to promote cancer screening, increase HPV vaccination, reduce obesity and prevent tobacco use. Projects are funded by national and state entities including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Patient Centers Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and California Tobacco Related Disease Research Program (TRDRP).
In recent years, Dr. Herrmann has become increasingly involved in the development and implementation of research and programs aimed to prevent use of tobacco and e-cigarettes among vulnerable population groups. She is currently Principal Investigator of a TRDRP funded study aimed to understand tobacco use among Indigenous Mexican agricultural workers, Co-Investigator on a TRDRP funded intervention trial to evaluate the effectiveness of school-based tobacco and e-cigarette prevention programming for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing youth, and recently completed a NCI-funded project that resulted in the development of an e-cigarette education program for Spanish speaking Latinx parents of adolescents, designed for delivery by promotoras.
Dr. Herrmann also leads a range of activities aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of community partners’ programming. Current projects include: the Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project (MICOP)’s promotore-led domestic violence and mental health prevention and early intervention program for Indigenous Mexican women; Public Health Advocates’ obesity prevention programming for African Americans in Stockton, California; and the Amelia Ann Adams Whole Life Center’s programming aimed to improve mental health among Black youth.
Dr. Herrmann sits on a number of state and national committees. These include the California Dialogue on Cancer’s Executive Committee and Cancer Plan Advisory Committee, the California HPV Roundtable, and the Advisory Committee for the Community in Science Program at the American Society of Preventive Oncology (ASPO). Dr. Herrmann received her MS in Social Psychology form the University of Georgia and her PhD in Health Services from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.