Our Team
Investigators
L. Brooke Keli‘ikoa, Associate Specialist. Dr. Keli‘ikoa serves as the Principal Investigator and co-lead for the Healthy Hawai‘i Evaluation Team. Her evaluation work spans health promotion and chronic disease prevention topic areas, but she has a special interest in evaluating built environment interventions to promote walkability and evaluating the efforts of cross-sector community coalitions. She has over 15 years of evaluation experience with the Healthy Hawai‘i Evaluation Team.
lehuac@hawaii.edu
(808) 956-6226
Meghan McGurk, Junior Specialist. Meghan serves as Co-Investigator of the Healthy Hawai‘i Evaluation Team and Principal Investigator of Hawai'i's CDC 2109 evaluation project aimed at training, deploying, and engaging community health workers to build community resiliency to COVID-19. Her work focuses on the evaluation of statewide policy and systems-change efforts and nutrition interventions to reduce obesity and other chronic diseases. She has been part of the Healthy Hawai‘i Evaluation Team since 2013.
mcgurkm@hawaii.edu
(808) 956-3401
Project Managers
Becky Rodericks, Junior Specialist. Her evaluation work focuses primarily on school health and youth-related evaluation projects. She has worked closely with DOH to evaluate programs that promote physical activity, nutrition, and tobacco-free lifestyles. She also serves as PI for the CDC 2001 tobacco evaluation project as well as a lead investigator for the Hawai‘i Health Data Warehouse. She has been an evaluator with the Healthy Hawai‘i Evaluation Team since 2010.
rebekah7@hawaii.edu
(808) 956-0434
Kara Saiki, Junior Specialist, joined the team in 2020, currently works on projects focusing on chronic diseases including diabetes and hypertension, advancing health literacy, and analyzes the trends of tobacco sales to minors. Her research interests include postpartum health and promoting healthy behaviors and lifestyle changes in different communities.
knsaiki@hawaii.edu
(808) 956-5505
Whitney Watts, Junior Specialist. Whitney currently works on projects focusing on primary prevention related to physical activity, nutrition, and tobacco prevention. Her research interests center around improving opportunities for physical activity in communities, specifically policy and built environment interventions to promote multimodal and active mobility. She joined the Healthy Hawai‘i Evaluation Team in 2023.
wnwatts@hawaii.edu
(808) 956-8894
Sakiko Yasuda, Junior Specialist, joined the Healthy Hawaii Evaluation Team in 2022. She currently works on projects to build community resiliency through the training, deployment, and engagement of community health workers. Previously, she worked internationally and evaluated health-related programs in the Solomon Islands, Thailand, and Japan.
sakikoy@hawaii.edu
(808) 956-6750
Claire Huang, Junior Specialist. Claire’s current evaluation projects focus on partnerships to build COVID-19 preparedness and community resilience through funding for community health workers; emergency services data integration with hospital stroke registry records; and a community health needs assessment of locally focused physical activity and health projects. Claire’s public health practice experience includes 6 years in Local Public Health Agencies working in Emergency Preparedness & Response, as well as in Communicable Disease Management and Epidemiology. In addition, she previously worked with the Northwest Center for Public Health Practice at the University of Washington, where she created and implemented public health evaluations across a six-state region, and worked as Project Manager for a national grant in Public Health Law Training and Curriculum Development. Her research interests include social epidemiology and infectious diseases, health disparities, public health law, survey data collection methods, and public health training and program evaluation. She has been an evaluator with the Healthy Hawai‘i Evaluation Team since February 2024.
clairehu@hawaii.edu
(808) 956-7277
Graduate Research Assistants (GRAs) and Research Assistants
Naomee Kong, MPH, Research Assistant, joined the team in January 2023. Her research interests include racial/ethnic health disparities, infectious disease, outbreak prevention, and mental health.
Sophia Kop, Research Assistant and undergraduate student majoring in public health and minoring in mathematics, joined the team in February 2023. Her research interests include infectious diseases, racial/ethnic health disparities, and health services.
Sydney Shibuya, MPH, Research Assistant, joined the team in September 2023. Her research interests include blood cancers, program evaluation, and working with local non-profit organizations.