Gina Green-Harris, director of the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Institute Regional Milwaukee Office, recently received a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Green-Harris has more than eighteen years of experience leading community engagement programs and building participatory research science in communities across southeastern Wisconsin.
Dr. Green‑Harris recently earned her Doctor of Philosophy in Clinical Investigation, where her dissertation focused on the role of community advisory boards and community members’ perspectives on health‑related academic research advisory structures. Through qualitative interviews and observational analysis, she examined how researchers can more effectively engage advisory boards and meaningfully incorporate more community voices into research design, governance and implementation.
“I wanted to know, is this true what’s in the literature? The only way to know is to build connections and find out what the community is asking for, and if the outcomes you find will even work for the people who helped you find it,” she said. “Good science entails asking the right questions, and the only way to do that is for researchers to really work with the community.”
Dr. Green-Harris’ leadership led to the foundation of the WAI Regional Milwaukee Office and the WAI Milwaukee Community Advisory Board (CAB), which is one of the oldest CABs both on our campus and in the country.
Dr. Green-Harris’ current work is advising NIH efforts to incorporate community advisory board input into national study guidelines. In addition to her work at WAI, Dr. Green-Harris is also director of the Center for Community Engagement and Health Partnerships and co-director of the Just Research program at University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.