Karen Peters, DrPH

Karen E. Peters, DrPH is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health in the Division of Health Policy and Administration and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the UIC College of Medicine in Rockford.  She received her MPH and DrPH at the UIC School of Public Health in the Division of Health Policy and Administration. Her dissertation focused on an examination of length of stay among a national sample of home health agency clients with an emphasis on organizational behavior and health services delivery. Following graduate studies, Dr. Peters was Director of Medicine and Public Health at the American Medical Association (AMA) where she served as the AMA’s representative to the National Medicine and Public Health Initiative, a joint collaborative project between the AMA and the American Public Health Association. She returned to UIC to assist in the development of the National Center for Rural Health Professions at the College of Medicine in Rockford where she is Assistant Director for Research and Evaluation and Co-Director of the Public Health Program on the Rockford campus. She also serves as one of the Core faculty in the SPH’s new DrPH Program in Public Health Leadership. She has produced over 25 peer reviewed publications and 50 meeting abstracts and presentations.  Dr. Peters research foci have included aging and public health, rural health care, public health workforce, community based participatory action research (CBPAR) with a focus on addressing health equity, and numerous evaluation studies at the national, state and local level related to chronic disease (arthritis, cardiovascular disease, oral health). She has co-developed and co-teaches a training course on evidence based public health for local public health workforce practitioners. Her current research is conducted under the auspices of the UIC Institute for Health Research and Policy, where she has had funding by the CDC and NIH. Her activities in the IHRP have included community based evaluation, evaluation of statewide oral health and arthritis statewide partnership activities and she is currently Principal Investigator on a five state cardiovascular research network focusing on perceptions of cardiovascular health and on a mental health study focusing on rural Latino immigrants in IL. In addition, she serves as interim Director of the Northern IL Area Health Education Center in Rockford and is Director of Dissemination for the Center for Research on Health and Aging at IHRP. Her service activities include participation on the American Public Health Association’s Action Board and editorial work for the Journal of Family and Community Health. In 2007 she was inducted as a Fellow of the Institute of Medicine of Chicago. Her international work is more recent and has focused in two major areas of research. The first uses the Community Based Participatory Action Research (CBPAR) approach to addressing health disparities in both the Colombian Amazon and, in the Dominican Republic. The second area focuses on health competencies, orientation to rural and interdisciplinary practice and professional values among health professions students and practicing providers in a series of comparative studies in India, Colombia and the US.