Jennifer Uhrig, PhD, directs RTI’s Center for Communication Science, which comprises more than 60 research scientists and strategists. She has 25 years of professional experience bridging the fields of health communication, public health, and health services research.
Dr. Uhrig draws on health promotion and behavior change theories, applies best practices in communication science, social marketing and human-centered design, and engages priority audiences in co-designing communication messages, concepts, interventions, programs, campaigns, and decision-support tools to motivate informed decision-making and health behavior change. She is adept at designing and conducting rigorous process, outcome and impact evaluations to measure the extent to which interventions are implemented as planned and result in meaningful changes. She is also skilled at generating actionable insights from evaluation results to inform future refinements.
Dr. Uhrig is experienced in quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods research, and has employed these methods across numerous multiyear, federally funded projects for clients including the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), and the National Institutes for Health (NIH). These complex projects routinely involve managing large, multidisciplinary research teams. Across her project portfolio, she has engaged health care and human services providers, key opinion leaders, community advocates, and community members. Her work has primarily been with members of populations who experience health disparities and who have historically been underrepresented or excluded from research. Furthermore, her research is often with members of populations who experience stigma because of a health condition, belong to a community that is stigmatized because of their personal characteristics and/or risk behaviors, and/or face intersecting stigma stemming from both a health condition and being a member of a stigmatized population.
Currently, Dr. Uhrig is a multiple principal investigator for RTI’s All of Us Research Program’s Engagement and Retention Innovator Award, which is a 5-year project funded by NIH and valued at $29 million, focused on engaging health care providers and community members with the historic research program. All of Us aims to build the most diverse health databases in history to advance understanding of genetic, behavioral, and environmental influences that interact to affect health. Since 2002, Dr. Uhrig has led a portfolio of projects focused on promoting informed decision-making and behavior change across the HIV prevention and care continuum. For example, she has led the formative, process and outcome evaluation contracts for CDC’s HIV communication campaigns and partnership activities since 2004.
