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Please click on a link below to learn more about
our Berkeley staff.
Project Coordinator
Prevention
Resource Information Specialist
Project
Coordinator
Sarah Calhoun
scalhoun@berkeley.edu
Sarah Calhoun has been a consultant in the
public health field since 1983, working with public
agencies, community groups and nonprofit organizations
to complete a wide variety of investigations,
program plans, evaluations and assessments. With
her background in both public health and city
planning, her specialty is community health assessments,
combining data about a variety of aspects of a
community's life (e.g., transportation, housing,
economic development, environmental, job and employment
data, along with traditional public health measures)
to form a composite image of the opportunities
for a healthy life for that community and any
opportunities for improvement. She has also conducted
numerous qualitative studies and has expertise
in qualitative data analysis methods.
In 1994 she was asked to develop a behavioral
research unit at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics,
augmenting the existing clinical, pharmacologic
and epidemiologic research units. She has been
instrumental in consolidating the research activities
at the Clinics into one autonomous department,
working at the staff level, the administrative
level and the board level to build support and
infrastructure for this organizational transition.
She has led numerous studies on patterns of drug
abuse, focusing on youth drug use. As these studies
were conducted on location in Texas, Florida,
other parts of California, she developed a rapid
assessment method for qualitative analysis of
a local drug abuse pattern. Her research work
on Rohypnol was ultimately accepted by the DEA
as the definitive description of that abuse phenomenon,
and it has become the standard for prosecution
of date rape cases in the absence of laboratory
evidence.
One of the purposes of her research work on drug
abuse patterns was to provide prevention programs
with accurate information from drug users about
the positive and negative consequences of their
drug use, in order to design effective and up-to-date
prevention strategies. In 1999, she became involved
in the prevention field directly, as the Project
Liaison for the Technical Assistance - Prevention
Outcomes and Measures program, funded by the California
Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs. She has
been involved in designing and implementing this
project from the outset, and has been instrumental
in bringing an awareness of drug abuse issues
to the project, as well as introducing qualitative
aspects to the project's data collection and analysis.
She has made many presentations of her research
work findings and methodology, from poster sessions
to plenary addresses. She has conducted workshops
on her qualitative research methods and her "broad-net"
monitoring strategy as well as on investigating
date rape cases and on the international implications
of the findings of her research work. She has
lectured in graduate-level college courses on
health care economics, public health policy studies,
and introductory drug abuse issues for undergraduates,
and has made presentations at the prevention trainings
conducted by the Prevention by Design/TA-POM project
for its regional trainers.
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Prevention
Resource Information Specialist
Allyson West
awest@berkeley.edu
Allyson West received her BA in Mathematics
from University of California, San Diego. She
spent eleven years in banking, culminating as
vice president and construction lender in Southern
California. She then went on to study India and
Pakistan for a Master's degree program at UC Berkeley,
where she also spent three years studying Hindi
and Urdu. She started her public health career
working for the Sexually Transmitted Disease Control
Branch for the California Department of Health
and Human Services, which she continued as an
administrator at UC San Francisco in the Department
of Pediatrics. She has volunteered for various
Tibetan refugee organizations here and abroad,
and currently devotes her volunteer time to assisting
and encouraging the incarcerated to attend college.
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