About
Angela Ebreo, PhD is the associate director of the Diversity Research & Policy Program (DRPP) and an associate research scientist at the University of Michigan. Currently, Dr. Ebreo is the co-PI on an evaluation of the Health Policy Research Scholars Program, an Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) funded Culture of Health leadership program. From 2009-2013, Dr. Ebreo served as the co-PI for an NIH-NIGMS funded project, "Understanding Exemplary Research Opportunity Interventions." In that role, she supervised more than 25 research assistants who contributed to this longitudinal study of the Big Ten Academic Alliance's Summer Research Opportunity Program, an exemplary program designed to develop underrepresented undergraduates as potential applicants to graduate studies. Dr. Ebreo has also been a co-instructor for Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research's Summer Research Program workshop on Methodological Issues in Quantitative Research on Race and Ethnicity. Her primary research interests are in social support and coping, especially in racial/ethnic populations and strength-based intervention strategies in educational settings. Her other scholarly interests include campus-community collaborative/participatory research, especially in areas related to education, health, and civic engagement. Before arriving at the University of Michigan, Dr. Ebreo was the assistant director for research and training at the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC-IRPP). At UIC-IRPP, she coordinated the institute's Asian American programs and activities, assisted with the Race and Ethnic Disparities in Health and Race, Ethnicity, and Urban Education Initiatives, directed externally funded projects, and mentored participants in the institute's Undergraduate Research and Leadership Training Program.
Current Work
Persistent health disparities, multiple societal ills, and poor population health outcomes are among the many issues impacting the health and well-being of the United States. Solutions to these problems requires new perspectives and creative approaches, such as enhanced multidisciplinary and multisector professional development and collaboration. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded the Health Policy Research Scholars (HPRS) Program as one of four national leadership programs designed to increase the capacity for developing such solutions. Researchers affiliated with the Diversity Research & Policy Program serve as the external evaluators for the HPRS Program. The major objectives of the evaluation are to: 1) assess whether the program is being implemented as planned; 2) determine its effectiveness in training scholars as future Culture of Health change agents; and 3) examine the effect of formal and informal support systems on scholars' coping with various challenges they experience as graduate students. The evaluation team uses a strength-based approach to understand how scholars are successfully navigating their doctoral programs and the HPRS Program.
Research Area Keyword(s)
Diversity in higher education, formal, informal support systems, strength-based interventions in educational settings