Dr. Robin Lanzi
Professor and Collaborative Director
rlanzi@uab.edu
205-975-8071
Robin Gaines Lanzi is an applied developmental psychology (PhD) health behavior (MPH) scientist with training and certification in Implementation Science. Dr. Lanzi is PI/CoPI of community engaged qualitative and mixed methods research teams focused on mental wellness, disability health promotion, and HIV prevention, treatment, and care. She is the National Director of Community Engagement and Translational Sciences for the National Center on Health, Physical Activity, and Disability (NCHPAD) and is the Director of Community Engagement with the Center for Engagement in Disability Health and Rehabilitation Sciences (CEDHARS). She is MPI of the UAB CFAR Implementation Science Consultation Hub and has served as the UAB CFAR Behavioral and Community Sciences Core Co-Director and as the Inter-CFAR Faith and Spirituality Research Working Group Chair.
Research:
Dr. Lanzi has extensive experience in conducting and providing mentorship in community engaged research, qualitative and mixed methods, mHealth, and implementation science. A central theme throughout Dr. Lanzi’s research is “putting research into practice” through multiple pathways, including a focus on community based participatory research (CBPR) in the design, planning, implementation, and dissemination of findings. This builds on Dr. Lanzi’s over three decades of work in CBPR, including as Academic Co-PI on the first NIH-supported CBPR multi-site longitudinal study addressing perinatal health issues (the Community Child Health Network, n=2400), PI and Co-PI on grants, contracts, and collaborative efforts with state and local agencies and foundations (including Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education, Alabama Department of Education, Children’s Trust Fund of Alabama, Children’s Defense Fund, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation, and Friends of West End), and with NCHPAD, CEDHARS, and CFAR. Dr. Lanzi’s research has also included directing an individual site as part of 2 National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) multi-site longitudinal studies on the prevention of child neglect and a five-year Research Career Development Award from NICHD, focused on child neglect among adolescent mothers. Current and recently completed HIV-related grants include an NIH EHE Implementation Science Consultation Hub, an NIH EHE Supplement: Project Relevant Implementation Strategies to Enhance (RISE) Status Neutral Community Health Workers in Alabama and Missouri (AL-MO), an NIH R43 and R44 mHealth grant for the development of a mobile based game to promote healthy sexual practices among adolescent; an NIH Supplement designed to qualitatively assess provider and client understandings of and experiences with PrEP access in Alabama to inform intervention development to promote PrEP uptake among high-risk African American adolescent girls and young women; an NIH Supplement to improve engagement in care and treatment adherence for people living with HIV in the African American and Latinx community; a Community Health Scholars study to increase HIV awareness and screening in the Deep South with community health advisors; a CHAAMPS grant (U54 mechanism) to develop strategies for the recruitment of male Community Health Advisors to promote comprehensive screening approaches for African American men; and a study that seeks to characterize barriers to routine HIV testing uptake among patients of a large Federally Qualified Health Center in Alabama to further understand provider perspectives on routine opt-out HIV testing. Dr. Lanzi collaborates with Dr. Angela Stowe and Dr. Lisa Schwiebert on the COVID-19, Race, and Student Mental Health Study among College Students and Postdoctoral Fellows.
Mentoring:
Throughout Dr. Lanzi’s research, she has conducted interviews about highly sensitive areas, focus groups, home based assessments and naturalistic observations of mother-child interactions, and standardized developmental assessments, and have trained scientific and community investigators and research staff on how to conduct interviews, focus groups, home based visits, and developmental assessments.
Teaching:
Dr. Lanzi teaches/has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on Mental Health Promotion, Disability Health Promotion, Adolescent Health Promotion, and the Health Behavior Doctoral Seminars and the Health Behavior core course, Social and Behavioral Sciences in Public Health, as well as courses in Research Methods (Intro and Advanced), Child Development, Cross Cultural Perspectives on Child Development, and Developmental Psychology.
Service:
As part of Dr. Lanzi’s Honors College Faculty Fellows Initiative, she proposed and launched the Mental Health Ambassadors (MHA) program, a peer to peer mental health promotion program that focuses on mental health knowledge, resiliency, and self-care, in collaboration with Dr. Angela Stowe, Director of Student Counseling Services and Juhee Agrawal, Honors College student. Additionally, she is the Faculty Co-Advisor for the UAB Best Buddies student organization.
Dr. Lanzi serves on the UAB Faculty Senate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee, the UAB Student Counseling Services Mental Health Faculty Advisory Board, and as a UAB Diversity Education Facilitator.
Dr. Lanzi shares that her “most significant experiences that I am most passionate about is being a mother to my five wonderful boys and being married to my super-duper hubby.”
