Meet our Team

The Program on Behavioral Health Services Team

Behavioral health services research requires a diverse group of people with substance expertise and technical skills. Our multidisciplinary team includes faculty investigators and students from across campus as well as Sheps Center project management and data science experts.

Joy Baumgartner, PhD, MSSW
Associate Professor of Social Work

Dr. Baumgartner conducts health services research in low-resource settings globally. Her research interests include integrated adolescent health services, and mental health services for adults living with psychotic disorders.

Bradley Gaynes, MD, MPH
Ray M. Hayworth, MD and Family Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry; Research Fellow

Dr. Bradley Gaynes a Professor of Psychiatry and Epidemiology, Director of the Division of Global Mental Health, and co-Director of the Department of Psychiatry’s Physician Scientist Training Program. His research focuses on the development and implementation of evidence-based management strategies to treat mental illness, with an emphasis on large scale clinical trials and health services research.

Kenneth Harris III
PhD Student, UNC-CH School of Social Work

Major Kenneth R. Harris III, LCSW, BCD, is an active-duty Army social work officer and current PhD student within the UNC-CH School of Social Work. Kenny’s research interests include psychological resilience and role–resiliency among active-duty military personnel, racialized and ethnic service member wellbeing, and psychosocial-spiritual mechanisms for human flourishing.

Jacob Hyman, MS
Sheps Center IT Analyst/Programmer

Jacob Hyman, MS, completed his master’s degree in data analytics from North Carolina State University in 2021. He began his career as a data scientist working in people analytics for LendingTree, where he tracked product performance metrics and employee churn rates across various department specialties. Through this experience, Jacob learned to utilize survival analysis models to predict time to event scenarios. Jacob began working as part of the Sheps team in 2022 where he has specialized in behavioral health studies, population level data analysis, and geospatial based projects.

Neil Kamdar, MA
Sheps Center Methodologist

Mr. Kamdar, M.A., is the lead and managing methodologist at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation (IHPI), Data and Methods Hub. He is also a consulting methodologist at Stanford University’s Center for Population Health Sciences and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research. Mr. Kamdar has served as a co-investigator on several large federal and foundation grants and contracts, including the Department of Defense (DOD), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), National Institute for Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR), the FDA, and the CDC. His focus has been primarily within three specific domains of research: women’s health, disabilities and vulnerable populations, and surgical outcomes. He has conducted work on large observational and administrative datasets, namely within OptumInsight, Medicare, Marketscan, Medicaid, the American Family Cohort, institutional electronic medical records, and large abstracted clinical registries in roles as a lead of analytic teams and via hands-on analysis. Mr. Kamdar lectures courses in population health analytics and epidemiology and has contributed to more than 100 co-authored peer reviewed publications.

Paul Lanier, MSW, PhD
Program Director; Professor of Social Work; Research Fellow

Paul Lanier, MSW, PhD is a Professor in the School of Social Work and adjunct Faculty in the Department of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his undergraduate degrees and a master’s in social work from UNC Chapel Hill and a PhD in Social Work from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on improving access to high quality mental health services for marginalized children and their families. Much of this work involves understanding and improving complex public systems, particularly in the state of North Carolina Dr. Lanier’s work primarily leverages large administrative health and social service datasets, such as Medicaid, to design longitudinal quasi-experimental studies examining program effectiveness. Paul is a member of AcademyHealth’s State University Partnership Learning Network and the Medicaid Outcomes Distributed Research Network.

Sarah McGlothlin, MSW
PhD Student, UNC-CH School of Social Work

Sarah McGlothlin, MSW, is a doctoral student at the UNC School of Social Work. Her research interests involve the maternal, child, and adolescent life course specifically focusing on bridging healthcare gaps within the vulnerable inflection points of pregnant and parenting women managing substance use disorders. As a research assistant working with Dr. Paul Lanier, McGlothlin’s research is particularly aimed at enhancing outcomes for youth, including those impacted by the foster care system, and supporting the most vulnerable adolescents in high school settings. She values social justice and connections within natural, built, and cultural environments. Her commitment to embracing diverse perspectives is integral to her approach, ensuring that her work benefits all communities by fostering inclusivity and equity across multiple settings.

Helen Newton, PhD, MPH
Assistant Professor of Family Medicine; Research Fellow

Helen Newton, PhD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine. She also is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the UNC School of Public Health. Dr. Newton has formal training as a health services researcher with expertise in behavioral health treatment, access, and quality and payment reform. Her research uses multiple methods to characterize the variation in access to evidence-based behavioral health treatment and estimate the impact of payment and delivery reforms on treatment access and quality. She is particularly interested in understanding how new policies – especially new payment models – affect the organization and delivery of behavioral health treatment.

Melissa Sandahl, MS
Sheps Center Data Scientist

Melissa Sandahl, MS, earned a Master’s degree in Analytics from the Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University in 2019. As a data scientist at Sheps, she works with healthcare claims data to provides insights and results to investigators across multiple project teams. Her expertise includes methods for conducting patient attribution using claims data, integrating data across payers for analysis, and working with child behavioral health claims. 

Orrin Ware, PhD, MPH, MSW
Assistant Professor of Social Work; Research Fellow

Orrin D. Ware, PhD, MPH, MSW, is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Social Work. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland School of Social Work, he completed a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) T32 postdoctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit. Dr. Ware’s research examines substance use and substance use disorder. His research skillset is bolstered by real-world experiences working as a licensed clinical social worker (i.e., in substance use disorder treatment facilities) and as a harm reduction researcher (i.e., conducting HIV screening on a mobile clinic in high-risk areas from 9:00 pm to 2:00 am). Further, he has an interdisciplinary lens with formal graduate and postdoctoral training in behavioral pharmacology, field epidemiology, public health, and social work. Some of his recent studies have focused on barriers to accessing services for substance use disorders, co-use of codeine and cough syrup (referred to as “lean,” “purple drank,” “sizzurp,” or “syrup”), and the co-occurrence of mental health disorders with substance use disorders.

Featured publications:

Ware OD, Garcia-Romeu A, Zamarripa CA, Hughes T, Wager L, Spindle T. Codeine and promethazine: Exploratory study on “lean” or “sizzurp” using national survey data and an online forum. PLoS One. 2024 Mar 25;19(3):e0301024. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0301024. PMID: 38527052; PMCID: PMC10962845.
Ware OD, Cano MT, Dalal Safa M, Garza N, Martinez S, Salloum I. Availability of substance use disorder treatment in Spanish: Associations with state-level proportions of Spanish speakers and treatment facility characteristics in the United States. Am J Addict. 2024 Jul;33(4):400-408. doi: 10.1111/ajad.13520. Epub 2024 Jan 24. PMID: 38264804.
Ware OD, Hussong A, Frey JJ, Daughters S, Cloeren M, Gryczynski J, Lister JJ, Jordan R. Decreases in Employer Referrals to First-Time Substance Use Treatment for Adults From 2004 to 2020. J Occup Environ Med. 2024 Mar 1;66(3):e87-e92. doi: 10.1097/JOM.0000000000003027. Epub 2023 Dec 13. PMID: 38151983.

Lisa Zerden, PhD, MSW
Associate Professor of Social Work; Deputy Director of the UNC Behavioral Health Workforce Research Center (BHWRC); Research Fellow

Lisa de Saxe Zerden, MSW, PhD is an Associate Professor in the UNC School of Social Work and the Deputy Director of the UNC Behavioral Health Workforce Research Center (BHWRC). Dr. Zerden’s research interests focus on the social drivers of health, including disparities that exacerbate behavioral health conditions. Her work explores the role of social workers and other types of behavioral health providers across health and community settings and policies to support these initiatives to improve health.