Meet our Team of Trusted Researchers
Operation ME is proudly conducted by a team of compassionate and professional researchers. Led by the Military Family Research Institute at Purdue (MFRI), the study team includes investigators from the Nathanson Family Resilience Center at the University of California Los Angeles (NFRC), the Naval Health Research Center (NHRC), the University of Ilinois, and the Utah State University (USU).
Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth, PhD
Distinguished Professor of Human Development and Family StudiesDirector, Center for FamiliesDirector, Military Family Research InstituteExecutive Director, Family Impact Institute
Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth leads the study team. She has directed MFRI at Purdue since it launched in 2000. Her research focuses on relationships between job conditions and family life, especially with regard to military families and organizational policies, programs and practices. She has been published in scientific journals such as the Journal of Marriage and Family and the Academy of Management Journal, and she has received numerous awards for her scholarship, including the Lu Ann Aday Award from Purdue University. Since 2005, MacDermid Wadsworth has been a fellow with the National Council on Family Relations.
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Valerie Stander, PhD
Research PsychologistNaval Health Research Center
Valerie Stander has worked as a research psychologist at the Naval Health Research Center (NHRC) for the past 20 years studying the health and wellbeing of military personnel and their families. In addition to her work on Operation ME, she is currently the principal investigator of the Millennium Cohort Family Study at NHRC. Stander has conducted research on a number of different issues such as interpersonal violence, substance abuse prevention and self-help for returning combat veterans. She continues to be interested in the issue of multiple traumatic exposure, particularly in conjunction with combat experiences.
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Patricia Lester, MD
Jane and Marc Nathanson Family Professor of PsychiatryDirector, Nathanson Family Resilience CenterUniversity of California, Los Angeles
Patricia Lester has sustained a career-long focus on developing and disseminating preventive interventions, practices and policies that support child and family resilience in the context of trauma and adversity. Her research and leadership have focused on the study of translational and implementation processes needed to bring evidence-based prevention to scale within systems of care and community settings.
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Sharon Christ, PhD
Associate Professor, Human Development and Family StudiesDepartment of StatisticsPurdue University
Sharon Christ is an associate professor at Purdue University, where she also serves as a faculty associate with the Center for Families and the Center for Aging and the Life Course. Her research includes applications in the social, behavioral and health sciences, especially statistical models applicable to human health and development processes. Most of her work involves analysis of existing large nationally representative data sets, but she also analyzes data collected using observation and experimental designs.
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Shawn Whiteman, PhD
Professor, Human Development and Family StudiesAssociate Dean for Research, College of Education and Human ServicesUtah State University
Shawn Whiteman conducts research on the connections between family socialization processes and youth health and socioemotional adjustment. He is specifically interested in how siblings directly and indirectly act as sources of social influence and social comparison within families and how their family experiences foster similarities and differences in their relationship qualities, attributes, and health-related behaviors.
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Leanne Knobloch, PhD
Professor, CommunicationUniversity of Illinois
Leanne Knobloch examines how people’s communication both shapes and reflects the ways they think about their relationships. She focuses on times of transition because individuals are more aware of their relationships when those relationships are in flux. Most of her recent work has focused on (a) how military families communicate after being reunited following deployment, and (b) how romantic couples communicate following a depression diagnosis. Both lines of research provide important insights into how to help people have more satisfying relationships.
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Dave Topp, PhD
Senior Director, Research and OperationsMilitary Family Research Institute at Purdue University
Dave Topp has directed MFRI’s research team since 2009, where he has led numerous research and evaluation projects. In addition to evaluating programs and materials for Sesame Workshop and ZERO to THREE, he has led studies for the Department of Defense and other agencies.
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