Faculty

Professor and Assistant Dean of Research, Department of Kinesiology and Health Promotion, UK COE

Professor and Co-Director of the Tobacco Policy Research Program BREATHE research team, UK CON

Director, AppalTRuST Career Enhancement Core

As a University of Kentucky Research Professor, Dr. Ickes has extensive experience in college and youth health promotion, including tobacco prevention, and has worked with university and community partners to reduce the prevalence of emerging tobacco products among at-risk youth and young adults. Through state and national funding, the #iCANendthetrend initiative has reached nearly 20,000 Kentucky youth to support reduced tobacco use initiation. Her research interests also go beyond tobacco control, including community-engaged research, youth empowerment, health equity in substance use prevention, and evidence-based program planning and evaluation.

Dr. Ickes serves as the Health Promotion Program Faculty Chair and Director of the Graduate Certificate in Health Coaching. She has taught a variety of specialized undergraduate and graduate courses in health promotion including Human Health and Wellness, Program Planning, Health Promotion and Behavior Change, College Health Promotion, Community Organizing and Health Promotion, and Worksite Wellness.

BREATHE: www.uky.edu/breathe/
#iCANendthetrend: education.uky.edu/endthetrend
PREVENT Community-Engaged Research Lab: https://ukprevent.org/

Professor, Nursing Instruction, UK CON 

Professor, UK COPH

Director, Biostatistics and Informatics Core, AppalTRuST 

Co-Director, BREATHE

Mary Kay Rayens is a professor and biostatistician in the University of Kentucky Colleges of Nursing and Public Health. As a co-investigator on more than 100 university- and extramurally-funded grants (funded by NIH, NINR, NIMH, NCI, NHLBI, NIOSH, CDC, AACN, American Legacy Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson, FAMRI and others), she has had many opportunities to plan, conduct, analyze and disseminate intervention and observational studies. Dr. Rayens currently serves as the Co-Director of the University of Kentucky BREATHE (Bridging Research Efforts and Advocacy Toward Healthy Environments) group and has collaborated on a variety of research projects related to tobacco policy and clean indoor air, many involving disparate populations. She is the Lead for the Biostatistics and Informatics Core and Multi-PI for Project 1 within the TCORS AppalTRuST Center.

Assistant Professor, Division of Biomedical Informatics, Department of Internal Medicine, UK COM

Manager, Cancer Research Data Commons, Cancer Research Informatics Shared Resource Facility,  MCC 

Dr. Jong Cheol (JC) Jeong is an Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky (UK) College of Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Biomedical Informatics. He is also a faculty member in the Markey Cancer Center (MCC) Cancer Research Informatics (CRI) Shared Resource Facility, where he serves as Manager of the Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC). Dr. Jeong's primary research interest lies in the development and application of methods in translational biomedical informatics to gain a better understanding of disease pathogenesis. His work aims to contribute to the development of precision medicine and improved diagnostics and therapeutics for cancer patients. Dr. Jeong's research focuses on the development of biomedical methods that utilize Big Data, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence methods to identify new biomarkers for cancer diagnosis, prognosis, and prediction of response to therapy.

Tenured Professor, Nursing Instruction, UK CON

Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programs and Health Policy, UK CON

As a fellow of the Center for Interdisciplinary Heath Education, Kristin Ashford, PhD, has led curricular transformation including integration of health policy competencies and instruction. Presently, she drives innovative, impactful state-academic and community partnerships to transform healthcare for perinatal and parenting women as the Good Samaritan Endowed Chair of Community Nursing. She has led the creation of two perinatal substance use treatment (SUD) programs that bridge gaps and advance healthcare in SUD and tobacco treatment for perinatal women. 

As founder and Director of the Perinatal Research and Wellness Center, Ashford leads an interprofessional team to translate research into practice while informing policy makers on maternal and child health issues. She has led prospective research studies funded by the National Institutes of Health, Center for Medicaid and Medicare Innovation, and the Alex and Rita Hillman Foundation Innovation in Care Program, and many others determining the policy impact of perinatal tobacco, electronic cigarettes, and substance use on maternal and birth outcomes. Through this transformational work coupled with her advocacy for nursing research as a Friends of the National Institute of Nursing Research Ambassador, Ashford was recognized as a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. 

Dr. Ashford recently completed the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellowship in Washington DC, where she served on the U.S. Committee on Energy and Commerce, Health Subcommittee.  She received her BS at Washburn University in Kansas and completed her training as a board-certification Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner at the University of Louisville. She further completed her PhD and NIH postdoctoral fellowship, Building Interprofessional Research Careers in Women’s Health (BIRWCH), and the Wharton Executive Nursing Leadership.

Assistant Professor, Department of Behavioral Science, UK COM 

Faculty, Center for Health Equity Transformation (CHET)

Dr. Mattingly is a social and substance use epidemiologist whose research focuses on structural, psychosocial, and policy determinants of population health and health equity. He has extensive training in descriptive and analytical epidemiological methods and tobacco regulatory science, gaining most of his research experience while working with the American Heart Association Tobacco Centers of Regulatory Science and the University of Michigan and Georgetown University Center for the Assessment of Tobacco Regulations. Dr. Mattingly’s research aims to address racial and ethnic health inequities in substance use and misuse, mental health, and physical health outcomes such as lung cancer. He is particularly interested in the role structural racism, and its downstream consequences such as interpersonal discrimination and police violence, plays in determining disparities in substance use and associated use disorders. The primary goal of his research program is to characterize drivers of inequities in substance use and associated health outcomes to inform public health professionals and policymakers of effective and efficient ways to promote health equity and improve population health. You can view his Google Scholar page here. 

Tenured Professor, Department of Psychiatry, UK COM

Catherine A. Martin, M.D. is a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist with a special interest in impulse disorders and substance use with a particular focus on nicotine use. She collaborated on a NIDA funded rural based Contingency Management smoking cessation intervention and was PI on an investigation of modafinil as an aid for smoking cessation. She has worked with lung cancer patients and developed a novel intervention to impact on family tobacco use. She led a statewide grant to train providers to treat adolescents with substance use. She is involved in the training of NIH funded clinical researchers with the NIDA: AACAP K12 program and is a mentor on an individual K award. She continues to provide psychiatric care to high risk youth in the Juvenile Justice system. She provides clinical education to trainees as well. 

Assistant Professor, Department of Behavioral Science, UK COM

Faculty, Center for Health Equity Transformation (CHET)

Lead for Project 2 in AppalTRuST

Dr. Rose is a member of the Markey Cancer Center in the Cancer Prevention Program, where her research focuses on cancer control and prevention, tobacco regulatory science and health equity. Her work aims to identify mechanisms by which policy initiatives can influence tobacco initiation and cessation and how policy can contribute to the reduction (or unintended widening) of racial/ethnic and socio-economic health disparities particularly in youth and young adult populations. She specifically works on potential health equity enhancing point of sale and marketing policies, marketing of tobacco products in the retail and social media environment, mobile technologies for data collection, and extensive work related to flavored tobacco and menthol tobacco. She is the PI on a NCI R01 focused on assessing the equity impacts of flavored tobacco sales restriction policies in 8 communities around the US. She is a collaborator on 3 R01s and a P01. Her research efforts have resulted in over 70 peer reviewed publications. She is also on the Editorial Board of Health Promotion Practice and is a Co-Guest Editor of a special issue on for the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research and Preventing Chronic Disease on menthol and flavored tobacco policies and practice. You can view her publications here. 

Shyanika Rose, PhD | University of Kentucky College of Medicine 

Associate Professor and Vice Chair for Research, Department of Family and Community Medicine, UK COM

Dr. Koffarnus is Director of the Healthier Futures Lab and an Associate Professor and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Kentucky. He received his BA degree in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire and completed both his MS and PhD degrees in Biopsychology from the University of Michigan. Dr. Koffarnus also completed an internship and Pre-Doctoral Fellowship at the National Institute on Drug Abuse before completing his Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Koffarnus is a leading expert on environmental factors that contribute to alcohol and tobacco use, specifically the use of behavioral economic approaches to understanding consumption of tobacco products and contingency management for decreasing substance use. Dr. Koffarnus is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and has served on the editorial board for the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology, and Psychology of Addictive Behaviors.

Mikhail Koffarnus, PhD | University of Kentucky College of Medicine 

Associate Professor, Department of Behavioral Science, UK COM

Associate Director of Population Science and Community Impact, UK MCC 

Dr. Hull is a medical sociologist with expertise in community engagement, health equity, implementation science, and evidence-based practices for cancer prevention and cancer care. In her role with Markey Cancer Center (MCC), she direct the Community Impact Office, leads Markey’s community outreach and engagement programs, and oversees the Markey’s population science research agenda and infrastructure.

Hull Research Team

Markey Community Outreach and Engagement

Associate Professor, Department of Health Management and Policy, UK COPH

Associate Professor, Department of Pharmacy Practice and Science, UK COP

Dr. Jayawardhana's research primarily focuses on the intersection of public policy and substance use research. She has been published in Medical Care, Health Services Research, and American Journal of Public Health. She earned her PhD in economics from the University of Virginia.

Endowed Professor, Department of Anthropology, UK CoAS

Director, Appalachian Studies Program

Ann Kingsolver grew up in Nicholas County, Kentucky, and returned to Kentucky in 2011 to direct the University of Kentucky Appalachian Center and Appalachian Studies Program, 2011-2015. (She is serving again as Appalachian Studies Program Director, 2021-2025.) She studies how rural residents talk about globalization and act on those understandings as they construct identities and livelihoods. The books she has written or edited include More Than Class: Studying Power in US Workplaces (ed., 1998); NAFTA Stories: Fears and Hopes in Mexico and the United States (2001); The Gender of Globalization: Women Navigating Cultural and Economic Marginalities (co-ed., 2007); Tobacco Town Futures: Global Encounters in Rural Kentucky (2011); The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology (co-ed., 2017); Appalachia in Regional Context: Place Matters (co-ed., 2018); and Global Mountain Regions: Conversations Toward the Future (co-ed., 2018). She serves on the Kentucky Academy of Science Board of Governors, publishes in peer-reviewed journals nationally and internationally, and connects her classes at UK with classrooms in multiple countries.

Ann Kingsolver | University of Kentucky College of Arts & Sciences

Associate Professor, Department of Epidemiology & Environmental Health, UK COPH

Dr. Christian's research examines the geographic distribution of disease and its relationship to demographic, socioeconomic, behavioral, and environmental factors, often with a focus on Kentucky and the Appalachian region. Dr. Christian has graduate degrees in epidemiology (MPH) and health geography (PhD), and he has applied this training to study of population health and disease using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and other spatial analytic tools.  His research comprises a variety of health outcomes and exposures, and he has experience analyzing population-based public health surveillance data, such as the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey and the Kentucky Cancer Registry (KCR), and data collected for a variety of epidemiologic studies.  Dr. Christian teaches a graduate course in disease mapping and data visualization for public health, and recently developed a new undergraduate course in chronic disease epidemiology. You can view his Google scholar page here and his ResearchGate profile here. 

Dr. Haynes is the Kurt W. Deuschle Professor of Preventive Medicine and Environmental Health and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health. She is director of the UK Center for the Environment and interim director of the UK Center for Appalachian Research in Environmental Sciences (CARES). She received a Master of Science in Toxicology from the University of Cincinnati and a Doctorate in Public Health in Environmental Health Science from the University of Michigan School of Public Health.  She is a community-engaged environmental health scientist who has forged multidisciplinary research teams to investigate community-identified exposure issues, primarily in Appalachian underserved communities.  Her research expertise is pediatric manganese exposure, but is also working to address community concerns about exposures related to hazardous waste incineration, landfill emissions, and chemicals associated with a train derailment.