Ms. Thompson is a Program Director at the PIRE-Louisville Center. She has a MA in anthropology from George Washington University and a BS from Michigan State University. She has a diverse background including collections research and quantitative and qualitative research methods.
For the past 14 years at PIRE, she has worked in the coordination, implementation, and project management of evaluation and intervention activities on the topics of youth access to harmful legal products, prescription drugs, and substance and alcohol abuse. She has also helped design and implement evaluations on youth mentoring, rural access to healthcare education, rural access to continued education credits, rural access to shelter for homeless teen mothers, prescription drug access, and oral health interventions with intellectually and developmentally disabled individuals. She has managed data collection, analysis, and reporting tasks for quantitative and qualitative data.
Ms. Thompson has also helped to culturally adapt instruments, training content, and intervention programs for rural, urban, and Appalachian regions, frontier Alaska, and Afghanistan. She has extensive experience with conducting international trainings, focus groups, key community member and stakeholder interviews, semi-structured interviews, and telephone surveys. She has been co-author on multiple peer-reviewed publications addressing the topics of youth e-cigarette use, obesity in rural and urban populations, substance abuse treatment, human rights violations, prescription drug misuse, and related issues such as risk and protective factors, family health behaviors, and health disparities.
Currently, Ms. Thompson is project manager on a NIDCR U01 RCT evaluating a caregiver intervention to improve the oral health of intellectually and developmentally disabled individuals living in group homes in and around Louisville, KY. She also continues to work on projects focused on Ohio’s transition to 988 as the new National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and the evaluation of emerging curriculum focused on Whole Health and wellness.
Ms. Thompson is also an active member of PIRE’s Race Gender and Equity Workgroup and focuses that time primarily on the Mentoring Subcommittee, which expands PIRE’s mentor training and availability to ensure access to mentors for all staff.
Finally, Ms. Thompson was recently project manager on a NIDA-funded R03 to assess within-persons and between-persons associations of e-cigarette and dual tobacco/nicotine use among Kentucky youth (ages 13-17), a critically important population when considering public health impact of e-cigarette use and needed FDA regulation. Follow-up data collection occurred with this sample (then 16-19 years old) during the early days of the pandemic, leading to one of the first longitudinal youth EMA tobacco studies. The team is currently publishing these findings.
