Brooke A. Levandowski, PhD, MPA

Health Science Specialist at the Veterans Health Administration’s VISN 2 Center of Excellence for Suicide Prevention and Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at S.U.N.Y. Upstate Medical University

Brooke A. Levandowski, PhD, MPA, is a Health Science Specialist at the Veterans Health Administration’s VISN 2 Center of Excellence for Suicide Prevention and Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at S.U.N.Y. Upstate Medical University.  She received a Masters in Public Administration from Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Public Health.  Dr. Levandowski’s research seeks to enhance patient-provider communication and thereby improve stigmatized health outcomes through understanding the influence of culture and sociodemographic characteristics on health decision making. Her current research applies this framework to two populations- young women and Veterans.  She is Principal Investigator on community based participatory research investigating the application of shared decision making principles to contraceptive conversations between providers and young women.  She also is Principal Investigator on two studies disseminating the evaluation of suicide prevention programming in the Veterans Health Administration: using qualitative data to understand clinicians’ use of safety planning with Veterans who are at high risk of suicide, and using mixed methods to investigate the coordination of suicide prevention efforts within primary care patient aligned care teams.  An epidemiologist by training, Dr. Levandowski has incorporated qualitative study designs into her research over the past five years, and was recruited by the VISN 2 Center of Excellence for Suicide Prevention to bring her experience with qualitative methodologies to existing projects evaluating suicide prevention efforts.