CEA invites you to a virtual roundtable of evaluators addressing health equity in Chicagoland. Health equity is a complex issue because it overlaps with policies, systems, and environments, as well as community-level context and health disparities that are historic and closely linked to systemic discrimination of resources. As a point of departure in this event, we will acknowledge the disconnect between health equity as a concept held by institutions and the application of health equity in communities. All panelists will then share their journey as champions for health equity. We hope to see you there.
Panelists
Erik Elías Glenn, MSW (He/Él): 
Erik is a mixed-heritage, Black and Mexican, gay cis man, originally from southwest Detroit. He is the senior project manager with the EDIT Program at Northwestern University, where he oversees technical assistance and evaluation services delivered to community-based and health services organizations in partnership with the Chicago Department of Public Health. He is a former executive director of Chicago Black Gay Men’s Caucus, where he engaged in community and regional planning to improve health outcomes among Black gay, bisexual, and same gender loving men. Throughout his public health career, Erik has worked to improve the long-term health outcomes of LGBTQ+ BIPOC through Chicago-based HIV elimination initiatives such as Getting to Zero Illinois, Black Treatment Advocates Network, and Chicago Area HIV Integrated Services Council.
Christina Iyengar, Dr.PH, MPH, 
is the lead evaluator for BEC at Rush with expertise in providing public health grant evaluations strategies and alignments for federally funded programs. Before joining Rush's BEC team, she worked as an Evaluation Strategist for Public Health Consulting and has several years of experience supporting the CDC evaluation team on a collaborative chronic disease prevention grant. She provided technical assistance to grantees and contributed to the national evaluation plan. Christina's evaluation focus recently has been on Rush's COVID-19 Health Equity Report and a refocus on health equity for the LAUNCH initiative. She describes herself as a qualitative experimental evaluator, adding rich contextual data to quantitative evaluation methods.
Diana Lemos, PhD, MPH (she/her) 
is a community psychologist, researcher, practitioner, and strategist focused on implementing, evaluating, and disseminating best practices for culturally responsive and equitable healthcare and community-based services. Dr. Lemos is currently the Director of Evaluation and Learning at the American Medical Association Center for Health Equity and is based in Chicago, IL. Some of her recent accomplishments include leading the AMA’s Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity (2021-2023), serving on the American Evaluation Association’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion Workgroup to inform AEA’s equity efforts, engaging in nationwide-efforts to elevate issues related to advancing systemwide efforts for more equitable, inclusive and accessible sociodemographic data collection efforts and tools to advance health equity, and most recently, co-editing the AMA Journal of Ethics Special Issue: Health Equity in US Latinx Communities.
Dr. Gregory Phillips II, PhD, MS (he/him) 
is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Medical Social Sciences and Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University NU, and founder of the EDIT Program. He is an infectious diseases epidemiologist whose career spans over a decade of exploring the complex factors that disproportionately impact the health of minoritized individuals, particularly sexual and gender minority (SGM) individuals. Drawing on his experience as a gay man, he uses a community-led approach in all his work, and has been one of the leading developers of several new program evaluation frameworks, including LGBTQ+ Evaluation and Systems-Informed Empowerment Evaluation. He serves as Associate Editor for the American Journal of Evaluation, Chair of the LGBTQ Topical Interest Group (TIG) and Program Chair of the Social Network Analysis TIG for the American Evaluation Association, is Affiliate Faculty with the Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment (CREA) and the Centre for Multicultural Policy and Program Evaluation, and was recently named to the Evaluation Policy Task Force (EPTF) in AEA.
Moderator
Shana Alford
is an evaluation and research practitioner with 15 years of experience in leading, co-leading, and collaborating to conduct public/community health program evaluations, community engagement, program design theory, as well as writing fundraising proposals, evaluation reports and publications. She has a specialization in food and nutrition security and nutrition related chronic disease, but she has been involved in other public health areas such as disaster preparedness. She is currently the VP of Research, Evaluation, and Data Insights at Common Threads and working remotely in Chicago.
