Bloustein School welcomes three new faculty members in 2024

The Bloustein School is pleased to welcome three new faculty members to the teaching ranks in the fall of 2024.

Zoe Lindenfeld, Ph.D. joins the Bloustein School as an Assistant Professor with the school’s health administration program after completing her Ph.D. in Public Health Policy and Management at NYU School of Global Public Health. She is a health policy and services researcher focused on mitigating factors that perpetuate health inequities for individuals with substance use disorders. She has used mixed-methods research designs with qualitative, quantitative, and geospatial data to evaluate questions related to how harm reduction can be operationalized as an approach to care within clinical settings, racial disparities in the availability of hospital-based substance use treatment, factors contributing to the development of comprehensive substance use treatment models, and the feasibility of using telemedicine for opioid use disorder treatment, among others. Her research contributes to theory and understanding of disparities in the distribution of services for substance use disorders, and can inform the decisions of health system leaders, policymakers, and practitioners.  

Katie Pincura, Dr.P.H. joins the Bloustein School as an Associate Professor of Teaching and will also serve as the Undergraduate Program Public Health Lead. She was previously an Assistant Teaching Professor and Program Director of the undergraduate and graduate Health Sciences programs at Western Carolina University. Her professional background is in community health and social services management, and her professional work is focused on health policy and healthcare workforce issues in underserved communities such as the uninsured, people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, people living with HIV, and those impacted by the opioid epidemic. At WCU, Dr. Pincura lead strategic planning for the Health Sciences programs, recruited new health sciences faculty, and contributed to annual budget development. She taught undergraduate and graduate courses in public health and health systems in a variety of teaching modalities (in-person, hybrid, and asynchronous online). She earned her doctorate in Public Health Leadership at Georgia Southern University.

Melinda Rushing, Ph.D., LMSW joins the Bloustein School as an Assistant Professor with the school’s health administration program. She is a health equity researcher who applies data science methodology to identify inequitable practices in the way health services are delivered and accessed in marginalized communities. Combining frameworks from social work, public health, and data science background have had a synergistic effect on the implications of her research. She uses a range of sources of data (administrative data, EHR, and survey data) to identify inequitable trends in healthcare practices so interventions at the individual and systemic level can be developed. She recently completed a three-year Pediatric Health Services Research Fellowship at the Susan B. Meister Child Health Evaluation and Research Center at the University of Michigan. Her research at CHEAR focused on improving access and quality of care among sickle cell patients as well as the application of various data science techniques to evaluate patient outcomes among sickle cell patients. Melinda received her Ph.D. in Health Promotion and Behavioral Science and a Data Science Certificate from the School of Public Health at the University of Texas Health Science Center. She also holds a Master’s in Social Work from the University of Houston.