Kathleen Thomas, Ph.D., M.P.H., has been hired as an associate professor at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. She joins the Division of Pharmaceutical Outcomes and Policy and will work from the School’s Asheville satellite campus.
Thomas comes to the School from UNC’s Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, where she serves as the associate director of the NRSA training program in health services research for pre- and post-doctoral fellows.
Thomas earned her Ph.D. in health economics from the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and her M.P.H. in health policy from Yale University. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. Thomas is an alumna of Pomona College, where she earned her undergraduate degree in classical languages.
Thomas’ research interests include improving access to care for underserved and minority populations with mental health needs, as well as disability policy and childhood autism. She is currently the principal investigator of an intervention trial for building activation skills among Latino parents raising children with mental health needs. She is also conducting a mixed methods study of access to care for ASL-users. In addition, she collaborates on studies of psychiatric nursing and social work workforce development, application of discrete choice experiments, treatment of childhood autism, and strategies to screen and treat opioid users from emergency departments.
Thomas’ work has been cited in the Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report, and The Guardian. She is recipient of the John Eisenberg Excellence in Mentorship Award from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the Steven M. Banks Award for Mentorship from the American Public Health Association.