Ms. Thompson is a Senior 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.
Since 2009, 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 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. For these projects, she has managed data collection, analysis, and reporting.
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 nicotine and tobacco, 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.
Most recently, Ms. Thompson is PD on a pilot project focused on delivering evidence-based Whole Health and well-being content in a community setting. She is PD for PIRE’s components on the NIH and FDA funded Appalachian Tobacco Regulatory Science Team, which is focusing on TRS data collection gaps in Appalachian KY. In collaboration with University of Kentucky, PIRE co-leads the community outreach and participant engagement core of AppalTRUST, developing and implementing an outreach campaign and multi-tiered recruitment and retention strategies. She also continues to work on statewide health initiatives, including Tennessee’s Department of Health efforts to decrease smoking and vaping among pregnant persons and their partners to increase healthy birth outcomes (Project GIFTS).
Since 2023, Ms. Thompson has served as a Staff Director on PIRE’s Board of Directors.
Since 2020, Ms. Thompson has been an active member of the PIRE Belong! workgroup and focuses that time primarily on the Mentoring Subcommittee, which expands PIRE’s mentor training and availability to ensure all staff have access to mentorship.
