简介

For the past 25 years, Dr. Allen's research has focused on the development, implementation, and evaluation of community-based interventions to promote cancer prevention and control in underserved populations, with an ultimate goal of reducing health disparities. Her work emphasizes community-based participatory approaches to identify community needs and build capacity to implement community-driven solutions. She has developed and evaluated peer-led and e-health interventions to promote cancer screening in a variety of settings, including worksites, churches, and public housing. More recently, she has studied strategies for ensuring wide-scale and equitable dissemination of evidence-based interventions to address health disparities. For example, she has worked with faith-based organizations, worksites, and public housing sites to disseminate the use of evidence-based cancer control interventions among audiences that may not be well-served by health care systems. Currently, Dr. Allen is the PI of a study funded by the National Cancer Institute to develop and test an interactive, web-based decision aid to promote informed decision-making for prostate cancer screening among African American men. In addition, she is conducting research to understand how heavy smokers will respond to newly-recommended lung cancer screening guidelines and is developing a decision aid to assist them in making screening decisions, while also promoting smoking cessation. She was recently awarded funding to conduct and evaluate a social media campaign using Twitter to increase uptake of the HPV vaccine among low-income, African American women. Areas of additional interest include "One Health" (connections among human, animal, and environmental health) and community mental health.