Faculty & Staff

Assistant Professor Bogue has 15 years of experience in community health education, program and supervisory management, and academic and career counseling. She currently serves in the division as an assistant professor of Health Sciences and the practicum coordinator. In addition, she serves as the coordinator for the undergraduate program. Asst. Professor Bogue greatly appreciates the opportunity to contribute to the health workforce needs of Alaska by supporting students' experiential learning experiences through field placements and teaching a variety of health science courses. For the last several years, Asst. Professor Bogue has focused her efforts on improving access to reproductive health care and high-quality inclusive sexual health education. More recently, she has been serving on COVID-19 response efforts in partnership with the State of Alaska Division of Public Health and ACRHHW. Outside of work, Kristin enjoys getting out in nature with her partner and two Australian Shepherds, Loki and Thor. 

• Online portfolio introduction

Dr. Hedwig is an applied cultural/medical anthropologist and assistant professor of Health Sciences at UAA. His primary research interests involve impairment/disability and health inequality in the areas of housing and homelessness, mental and behavioral health, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD), and community-based supported living. He has worked extensively on questions related to cultural adoption and kinship caregiving, child welfare, adolescent health, suicide prevention, community-engaged approaches to alcohol and substance use risk prevention, and health advocacy. He is passionate about teaching and learning and enjoys the challenge of translating research into practice in collaboration with communities.

Britteny's research focuses on engaging older adults (aged 65+ years) in community-engaged projects to enhance healthy and positive aging. Her research involves undergraduate and graduate student research assistants from the UAA Healthy Aging Research Lab to investigate the barriers and facilitators to healthy aging, and develop interventions to improve health outcomes in the Circumpolar North. Britteny teaches service-learning, community-engaged and interprofessional health courses and serves on the UAA Interprofessional Education Committee. She also is a board member for the Alaska Anthropological Association.

• Dr. Howell's Website
• Research Publications
• UAA Healthy Aging Lab
• Google Scholar profile

Dr. Schwarzburg is an assistant professor of Health Sciences specializing in circumpolar, environmental and Alaska Native health research—and among courses taught in the undergraduate program. With a background in medical anthropology and health policy, she seeks to facilitate community-based decisions on environment, food ways and birth ways; while exploring varied ways of knowing. She also enjoys serving as faculty advisor to the Health Professionals Student Organization, and in her free time, you will find her hiking, biking or trying her hand at curling.

Dr. Whitmore is a lifelong Alaskan who returned to the state after completing an M.S. in Industrial and Organizational Psychology and Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at Virginia Tech—to help Alaska “grow our own” workforce. Her current research interests center around the role of trust in a patient-provider relationship, interventions to support families of young children in rural Alaska, and effective teaching in the Health Science classroom. Dr. Whitmore's teaching invites story into the health policy classroom, partners evaluation students with community programs where they can apply their learning to support operations, and introduces students to what public health looks like in Alaska. Outside of work, you often can find Corrie out on the trails hiking or skiing slowly, with two young boys and an old dog.

Jennifer is an assistant professor at the UAA Division of Population Health Sciences. She has taught Health Science, Nursing and Allied Health courses for UAF and UAA since 2009. Upon graduating from UC Davis and Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, she worked as an ER nurse while finishing her master's degree in Public Health at the University of Washington. She has served as a Public Health Nurse in the YK Delta and completed her doctorate in Public Health at Walden University. Current research interests include science communication and misinformation, community water fluoridation and program evaluation for infectious disease control interventions.

Dr. Miller completed a DrPH at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans, and she holds an MPH in public health nursing and an MS in Maternal and Child Health from the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on health disparities in maternal and child health, access to preventive health services for low-income women and their families, and health care services for children with disabilities, especially in rural and remote areas. She currently teaches the MPH epidemiology and health services administration and policy courses. In addition to her role within the division, she serves as the training director for the nationally funded Alaska LEND Program at the Center for Human Development. The LEND Program is a graduate, post-graduate program in interdisciplinary leadership working with Fellows across Alaska.

Dr. Amstislavski's work centers on the nexus of Circumpolar public and environmental health. He teaches environmental health, statistics and GIS/spatial analysis courses within the MPH Program. He also researches and develops biotechnologies to reduce our environmental footprint in high-latitude regions. His innovation in biomaterials is at the core of the Biomaterials Lab at UAA. He earned a PhD from the Earth and Environmental Sciences at City University of New York and his master’s degree from Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Dr. Fried is an assistant professor of Health Science within the Institute for Circumpolar Health Studies. Her work focuses on identifying the social, nutritional, cultural and economic underpinnings of health outcomes in terms of both risk and resilience. Dr. Fried's research includes examining the intergenerational impacts of traditional or subsistence foods among Alaska Native mothers and children, traditional food security, and other mixed methods projects related to food environments and health disparities with a commitment to active and meaningful community-driven research. Dr. Fried grew up in Alaska, and prior to coming to UAA she earned her PhD at Northwestern University and has worked on health-related projects in the Chicago area, the Philippines and in Ecuador. Dr. Fried spends her free time skiing, hiking, berry picking and otherwise enjoying all that Alaska has to offer.

Dr. Hahn is an assistant professor of Environmental Health within the Institute for Circumpolar Health Studies. Her work focuses on understanding the health impacts of climate change and working with communities to develop strategies for adaptation. Although she is open to projects and collaborations that broadly address environmental health topics, her priority research areas are ecological questions at the center of One Health, strategies to improve food security and local food production, and the health co-benefits of climate mitigation. Dr. Hahn is committed to interdisciplinarity, collaboration and community engagement. She utilizes a variety of methods in her work, including geospatial analysis, remote sensing, human surveys and ecological sampling. Prior to joining UAA, she was an epidemiologist at the Centers for the Disease Control and Prevention Climate and Health Program and the Division of Vector-borne Diseases where she developed ecological models related to West Nile virus and Lyme disease. Outside of the research world, she enjoys outdoor adventures of all kinds, growing and foraging whatever is possible in Alaskan soil, and slinging salmon while developing her commercial salmon business.

• Micah B. Hahn Wordpress page
• Google Scholar profile

Dr. Lessard is an assistant professor of Health Sciences and a maternal and child epidemiologist at the Institute for Circumpolar Health Studies. She has extensive experience developing research protocol and interventions addressing reproductive health disparities and inequities. Her current projects include a PCORI-funded comparative effectiveness study evaluating enhanced prenatal care systems, Project EMBRACE. Dr. Lessard’s previous projects focused on coordinating with practitioners and patients to address key maternal health issues including maternal mental health; obesity and contraception use; racial and cultural humility in clinic settings; adolescent preconception health; and co-morbidities associated with preterm birth. Prior to her role at UAA, she served as the research director for the Fresno County Preterm Birth Initiative—CSU Fresno and Research Scientist for the Central Valley Health Policy Institute—CSU Fresno. Dr. Lessard completed her PhD in Public Health at UCLA and her MPH at UC Berkeley in Maternal and Child Health. Prior to completing graduate school, she was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Suriname, South America, and completed her Bachelor of Arts in Political and Community Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She moved to Anchorage in 2017 and in her free time enjoys back country skiing, pack rafting and hiking.

David Parker holds a doctorate in epidemiology with a focus in biostatistics. Dr. Parker has more than 100 publications, including peer reviewed manuscripts, policies, white papers, conference presentations, white papers, and technical reports. Over the last 12 years, he has served as PI on more than $15,000,000 in funding in the areas of HIV, STIs, viral hepatitis, homelessness, injection drug use, substance use disorders, and connections to care. 

His research areas include the integration of information technology into healthcare to improve health outcomes and reduce costs. International and domestic projects focus on infectious diseases, international security and information assurance, remote healthcare, and AI/robotics; natural language processing for health condition identification; and use of AI/algorithms to identify vulnerable populations using large data. Projects are developing in partnership with healthcare institutions, governments, insurers, and private/IT healthcare companies. 

Rebecca has more than 10 years of experience in the environmental sciences, including work at the U.S. Geological Survey Water Resources Division and a private environmental consulting firm. She most enjoys working with data sets and interpreting the story within the numbers. Her investigations include the subjects of river flow, water quality, meteorology and air quality, but now she is excited to have the opportunity at ICHS to match observations within our physical environment with social, economic and health implications. Rebecca earned her BS in environmental science from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. When not exploring data, she enjoys exploring Alaska by boat, plane, bike and ski, and conversing in rusty Spanish or beginner Russian.

Mariah Seater, born and raised in Alaska, holds a B.S. and M.S. from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and an MPH and graduate certificate in children's mental health from the University of Alaska Anchorage. Prior to joining ICHS in 2019, she held positions in the education, government and non-profit sectors focused on areas such as health communications, outdoor education, senior and disability healthcare access, and youth development.