Drug Use and Misuse: A Community Health Perspective

Christy N. Bazan is a Licensed Environmental Health Practitioner and Master’s Certified Health Educator. She has an MPH from Benedictine University in Health Education and BS in Environmental Health from Illinois State University.

She has taught in higher education for over 25 years with primary interests in Community and Public Health and School Health Education. Her passions in the field include disease prevention, drug abuse prevention education, and contemporary health issues.

When she is not teaching, she is engaged in her Community of Bloomington-Normal, IL, where she serves at the President of the YMCA Board. She loves cooking, golfing, walking, exercising, and spending time with family and friends.

Brandi Barnes is a Research Development Manager at the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute (IHSI). Her primary role is to work with faculty, administration, and external stakeholders to identify, expand, and support new initiatives aimed at reducing health disparities. She achieves this by facilitating collaborative research proposals and by organizing campus and community events, programs, and workshops. Dr. Barnes also serves as a program coordinator for the Community-Academic Scholars Initiative, where she mentors undergraduates during a ten-week community-based research experience. In addition, she works with the Health Sciences Data Analytics Core at IHSI to collect and analyze data for strategic planning.

Brandi Barnes has a background in health promotion and health education program implementation and evaluation from her prior experience at a behavioral health treatment and research center. She earned her bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her doctoral degree is in community health with a specialization in health psychology. Her research areas of interest include preventing stigma in accessing mental health care services and barriers to treatment.

I am interested in adapting mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) for a variety of target audiences and investigating the impact of participating in MBIs across a range of outcomes including psychological well-being, self-efficacy, creativity, resilience, performance and health behavior change.

Broadly, my interests lie at the intersection of social work and public health applying strengths-based, participatory and culturally responsive approaches within an evidence-based framework to improve the lives of underserved populations in both urban and rural settings. As an experienced social science/ mental health/ public health research-practitioner, I have skill sets across four domains:
(1) Mindfulness Instruction – mindfulness instructor, mindfulness instructor trainer;
(2) Research – epidemiology, implementation science, data collection/ management/ analysis,
measures, IRB submissions, conducting literature reviews, writing peer-reviewed
publications, presenting at academic conferences;
(3) Programming – program planning/ implementation/ evaluation, curriculum development; and
(4) Community – engagement/ outreach, organization/ capacity building, assessment, training/
education.

After graduating from University of Illinois in 2009 with her B.S., Emily Verone continued her education at Illinois as a graduate student in Community Health. During her master’s work, Verone taught several undergraduate Community Health classes and focused her graduate work on various food insecurities and rural health. After earning her Master’s degree in 2011, Verone went on to work as a Health Educator for Duval County Health Department in Jacksonville, Florida.

With a desire to gain clinical experience, she completed nursing school at Jacksonville University earning a B.S.N. and M.S.N. Her area of expertise is emergency and medical-surgical nursing and is a Certified Emergency Nurse through ANCC. With a desire to practice in underserved communities, Verone applied for and was selected as a Department of Health and Human Services Nurse Corp Participant from 2012-2015.  She has led several workgroups with a focus on improving patient care using evidenced based practice, advanced data collection methods, and electronic medical record tools. Other certifications include BLS, PALS, and ACLS.