Wayne Cole, Retired CT DOC Captain, HITEC Advisor, Supervisors Design Team
HITEC
Advisory Team
A HITEC Advisor may be a professor, staff personnel from UConn, doctoral students or qualified CT-DOC officers. Advisors attend Design Team meetings and help assist Facilitators to organize Design Teams by using the IDEAS Tool Process.
ACADEMIC ADVISORS
Martin Cherniack, MD, MPH
Principal Investigator
Martin Cherniack, MD, MPH is Professor Emeritus of Medicine at UConn Health and is the Principal Investigator on HITEC. He has led HITEC’s work with corrections since 2006. Until the end of 2021, Dr. Cherniack was active as an occupational medicine clinician. He formerly directed the Ergonomics Technology Center at UConn Health and worked closely with biomedical engineering students and faculty. He has been engaged with the NIOSH Total Worker Health® program from its inception and has received its Founder’s Award. He has also received lifetime achievement awards from the American Psychological Association, the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists, and the American Public Health Association.
Matthew Brennan, MPH
Project Manager and Advisor
Matthew Brennan, MPH, is a Research Associate at UConn Health, Occupational and Environmental Medicine. He has served in a variety of research positions and has experience implementing, coordinating, and overseeing community-based behavioral health and participatory action research projects. In 2018 he became a member of CPH-NEW, a NIOSH Total Worker Health® Center of Excellence where he assists in workplace interventions that promote health, safety and well-being of workers. He is the Project Manager of the HITEC project focused on addressing workplace factors that impact correctional employees, as well as the Total Teacher Health project focused on addressing teacher stress in Connecticut.
Alicia Dugan, PhD
Advisor
Dr. Alicia G. Dugan, PhD is an Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine and a core faculty member at the Center for the Promotion of Health in the New England Workplace. Dr. Dugan is trained as an industrial-organizational psychologist and uses community-based participatory research methods to develop workplace interventions to address health concerns such as sleep, mental health, and obesity. She has expertise working with various vulnerable worker populations in many sectors, including corrections, manufacturing, and education, and is recently turning her attention to supporting workers with chronic health conditions such as cancer and cardiovascular disease.
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Sara Namazi, PhD
Advisor
Dr. Sara Namazi is an assistant professor at Johnson & Wales University and a public health researcher with experience in worker health, work-family research, and community-based participatory research methodology. Dr. Namazi's research currently focuses on addressing working conditions for individuals in carceral settings. Sara currently has a sub-award with UCONN Health and is a co-investigator on the HITEC study. Sara received her master’s (2014) from the University of Guam in environmental science and her doctorate (2019) in public health from the University of Connecticut. She also has a graduate certificate in occupational health psychology.
Mazen El Ghaziri, PhD, MPH, RN
Advisor
Dr Mazen El Ghaziri is an Associate Professor/Associate Chair at the Solomon School of Nursing, UMass Lowell. Dr El Ghaziri earned his PhD from the University of Maryland, Baltimore, in 2013. He served as a postdoctoral fellow at UConn, Occupational and Environmental Medicine on HITEC from 2013- 2015. He serves as an advisor/investigator on the HITEC project. His research is focused on workplace health promotion, safety, and well-being with a specialization in workplace violence in the correctional and healthcare settings. As part of CPH-NEW, Dr El Ghaziri serves as the co-coordinator of the National Corrections Collaborative and co- Principal Investigator for a National Institute of Corrections cooperative agreement.
Tess Parker
Advisor
Tess Parker is a graduate student at UConn in the Department of Psychological Sciences studying Industrial Organizational Psychology and Occupational Health Psychology. Her interests and work revolve around the promotion of health, safety, and well-being by engaging workers in identifying their concerns in the workplace to then design and implement holistic solutions to address them. Tess has advised the custody and health services teams based at York CI since the summer of 2023.
Vicki J. Magley, PhD
Professor
Vicki Magley received her PhD in Social and Organizational Psychology in 1999 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is a Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Connecticut. Her research combines both organizational and feminist perspectives in the study of workplace sexual harassment and incivility and often results from consulting with organizations (e.g., World Bank Group, institutions of higher education) and federal agencies (e.g., Army, Air Force, US Department of Interior) in understanding their climate of mistreatment and in evaluating interventions designed to alter that climate.
Michelle Robertson, PhD, CPE, FIEA, FHFES
Dr. Michelle M. Robertson, PhD, is a research faculty at the University of Connecticut, Psychological Sciences, and a CPH-NEW research affiliate. Her research investigates the effects of organizational interventions on worker’s well-being, safety and performance. She has expertise in conducting field and applied research in a variety of industries to design integrated health, workplace and ergonomics training and organizational interventions by using a systems approach that includes participatory and macroergonomics research methodologies. Dr. Robertson conceptualized and co-developed the participatory based systems analysis process, Intervention Design and Analysis Scorecard (IDEAS) Tool. She received the NORA/NIOSH innovative research award and the NIOSH/APA Best Intervention Honorable Mention Paper.