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| Home > About FHOP > Staff | |
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 Geraldine Oliva, MD, MPH |
Jennifer Rienks, PhD |
| Linda Remy, PhD |
Gosia Pellarin, MS |
Geraldine Oliva, MD, MPH, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine and a member of The Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California at San Francisco. Since 1992, she has been the Director of the Family Health Outcomes Project.
Dr. Oliva is a board-certified pediatrician who has had a broad background as a clinician, public health administrator and researcher. Between 1973 and 1977, she directed the development and operation of the Adolescent Medicine Program at Children's Hospital in Oakland, California. During the next six years, she served as Medical Director of the San Francisco/Alameda Planned Parenthood affiliate. There she developed a model for quality assurance based on process and outcome criteria that served as a prototype for both national Planned Parenthood and the federal Title X program. She also led the agency in the establishment of a multi-service center for youth in Hayward, California called the Eden Youth Center.
From 1982 to 1991, Dr. Oliva served as Family Health (MCAH) Director and then Deputy Director for Community Public Health Services for the San Francisco Department of Public Health. In this capacity she supervised all of the Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health clinical services and programs and later all of the clinical and public health programs at the eight health centers run by the department. Accomplishments include the development of a credentialing system for clinicians, clinical protocols and a quality assurance system. She led an effort with Dr. Claire Brindis to establish the first school-based health clinic in California, now in its 21st year of operations. During her tenure she also worked collaboratively with Dr. Paula Braveman from UCSF to develop a model for local public health surveillance for women, infants, children and youth. The resulting report entitled "The Health and Well Being of Children in San Francisco" has been used nationally as a prototype for other health departments.
In 1992, Dr. Oliva conceived of and obtained funding to establish the Family Health Outcomes Project in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Oliva has served as principal investigator on numerous demonstration and research projects related to three areas. They include: development of approaches and tools for supporting local and state health departments in performing assessment, program planning and policy development and assurance; assessing the effects of health policy on the health status of children; and the development and evaluation of effective models of care for prevention of HIV infection in high risk women and eliminating disparities in birth outcomes through community-based participatory research. Dr. Oliva is currently the Principal Investigator on two projects: the first is "Building Capacity for Needs Assessment and Assurance for the 61 Health Jurisdictions in California" funded by the California Department of Health and Human Services Maternal and Child Health Branch; the second is a project "Improving the Quality, Access to and distribution of Essential Vital Records Data in California." She is also Co-PI with Ginger Smyly at the San Francisco Department of Public Health on a CDC funded community based research and demonstration project "The Seven Principles Project for African American Infant Survival and Community Unity." FHOP's role on this project is to evaluate the effectiveness of the project's community level interventions.
Linda Remy, PhD, has worked as FHOP's Research Director since 1995 and as a health policy researcher at UCSF since 1989. Linda's research has focused on problems affecting families and children in access to services and outcomes in hospitals, foster care, juvenile detention, jails and prisons, substance abuse, domestic violence, mental health, and cancer. She has been teased about how depressed her computer's hard drive must be. As a methodologist, she specializes in longitudinal population health research, data linkage methods, graphic display of quantitative data, and developing innovative ways to monitor and report population health indicators. She has taught graduate classes in research methods, statistics, and human development in the social environment at several colleges and universities. Before coming to UCSF, she designed information systems and did research and evaluation for a wide variety of non-profit organizations. A person with many interests, Linda co-wrote two highly successful films and was Associate Producer for one of these. She served as a publicly elected Director of the Marin Healthcare District from 1996 to 2000 and has co-founded and served on the boards of numerous community-based organizations. Her undergraduate degree is from New College of California and her graduate degrees (MSW, PhD) are from UC, Berkeley.
Jennifer Rienks, PhD, is a Research Associate with FHOP since 1996. Ms. Rienks received both her Masters of Science degree and PhD in Social Psychology from the University of California, at Santa Cruz. Since joining FHOP in 1996, Dr. Rienks has worked on a variety of research projects and brings data analysis, research and survey design and project management skills to FHOP. Past projects include the evaluation of a risk assessment tool for the targeting clinical outreach and HIV prevention services to high-risk women; an evaluation of a breast-cancer navigator project; and a community collaborative research project funded by the University wide AIDS Research Project to compare the effectiveness of standard HIV testing and counseling vs. an enhanced intervention that includes STD screening. Currently Dr. Rienks is working with Dr. Oliva and other FHOP staff to evaluate the SevenPrinicples Project – a project to reduce black infant mortality disparities in San Francisco that is being conducted by the San Francisco Department and Public Health and funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Gosia Pellarin, MS received her Masters of Science degree in Biochemistry and for many years conducted research in the field of Cancer Genetics at the Brain Tumor Research Center at UCSF. In 1994, she co-founded a Buddhist non-profit corporation for which she performed many functions as a volunteer, such as finance manager, event coordinator, publications manager, web master, and executive editor of a Buddhist magazine. In December 2005 Gosia joined FHOP as Program/Finance Manager. In this role she oversees all financial and administrative aspects of FHOP, participates in training seminars and software development, maintains FHOP web site; coordinates consultation and technical assistance to state, county and non-profit agencies in data collection, analysis and reporting, and the use of FHOP's web site and software tools, and supervises production and dissemination of FHOP Newsletter.