Emeritus Investigators

Richard Deyo, MD, MPH

Clinical Investigator Emeritus

Dr. Deyo was the first person to hold the position of Kaiser Permanente Professor of Evidence-Based Family Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University, which entailed fostering community-based research collaborations between Kaiser Permanente and OHSU. In this position, which he held from 2007-2017, Dr. Deyo was a clinical investigator at CHR.

Dr. Deyo has a long-standing research interest in measuring patient function, involving patients in clinical decisions, and managing low back pain. He is a deputy editor of Spine, a member of the editorial board of Cochrane Back and Neck, and co-editor of the book Evidence-Based Clinical Practice: Concepts and Approaches.

Mary L. Durham, PhD

Senior Investigator Emeritus

From 1995 to 2016, Dr. Durham served as director of the Center for Health Research and vice president of research for Kaiser Permanente. In addition to her leadership roles, Dr. Durham conducted her own research on workplace health and translational research.

In tandem with her distinguished health research career, Dr. Durham worked with state and federal lawmakers in crafting policy-level decisions across a wide range of topics, such as privacy, mental health law, genetics, research, and human subjects protection. She consulted with and provided expert testimony to the President’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission, the World Health Organization, and the Association for Health Services Research (Academy Health), among many others. In addition, as an ambassador for Kaiser Permanente, she spoke to audiences around the world about the Kaiser Permanente health care model.

Dr. Durham was a professor in the Department of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University, and an adjunct professor in the Department of Sociology at Portland State University. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of Oklahoma in 1978, specializing in medical sociology. Before joining CHR, she was deputy director of Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound’s Center for Health Studies and on the faculty at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health and Community Medicine, in the Department of Health Services.

Carla A. Green

Senior Investigator Emeritus

Dr. Green joined the Center for Health Research in 1998 and was a senior investigator from 2005-2015. A health services researcher, she focused on mental health and substance abuse services. She simultaneously held positions at Oregon Health & Science University, where she continues to serve as a clinical associate professor in the Department of Public Health. She also continues in a part-time role at CHR mentoring early-career investigators and working on projects related to opioid misuse, abuse, addiction, and overdose.

Dr. Green’s research included FDA-mandated, multi-site studies that examined risks — for example, misuse, abuse, overdose, and death — associated with use of opioid therapy for treating chronic pain. She most recently completed work on an NIMH-funded study to identify factors affecting preventive service use among patients with serious mental illnesses. Other projects included a study that successfully tested the efficacy of a weight loss program for patients taking antipsychotic agents (STRIDE) and a study that examined the effect of a tamper-resistant formulation of OxyContin on overdose rates.

Mitch R. Greenlick, PhD

Senior Investigator Emeritus, 1995-2020

Dr. Greenlick was the founding director of the Center for Health Research. He served in that role from 1964 until 1995, and as a Senior Investigator Emeritus from 1995 until his death in 2020.

Dr. Greenlick’s research activities were in the areas of large-scale demonstration projects relating to the organization and financing of medical care and behavioral interventions to prevent disease and promote health. In addition, he had extensive experience in clinical trials, both at the local and national levels, and provided leadership at the national level.

He served as vice president for research of Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and as the first director of the Kaiser Permanente Dental Care Program (now Kaiser Permanente Dental), which he founded with Ted Colombo Sr. (1931-2014), also of CHR. His colleagues lauded him as a public health visionary, expert and advocate.

From 1990 to 2000, Dr. Greenlick was a professor and chair of the School of Medicine's Department of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU).

Never wanting to rest, after leaving OHSU Dr. Greenlick entered politics and was a nine-term Oregon state representative beginning in 2003, and chair of the Oregon Legislative Assembly’s Health Care Committee beginning in 2007, until his death at age 85.

Dr. Greenlick received his PhD in medical care organization from the University of Michigan. He was a research adviser on nationwide projects and an adviser to several foreign government research and medical care projects. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences when it was formed in 1971.

Brian Hazlehurst, PhD

Senior Investigator Emeritus

Brian Hazlehurst, PhD, is a cognitive anthropologist interested in the cognitive, social, cultural and technological properties of health and healthcare. His investigations include the study of care provider work practices and the needs of people with chronic illness, as well as the design and development of appropriate information-processing tools for these populations.

Dr. Hazlehurst joined CHR as a Medical Informatics Investigator in the summer of 2001. Previously, he was chief scientist and director of research and informatics at WebMD, an Internet health care company. At WebMD he led the R&D effort focused on using the Internet to empower chronically ill people. His work included the design and development of information retrieval and knowledge-based systems, for which he received three U.S. patents. Dr. Hazlehurst received his PhD in cognitive science and anthropology from University of California, San Diego, in 1994. He holds an external clinical faculty appointment at the Division of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology at Oregon Health & Science University.

Mark C. Hornbrook, PhD

Senior Investigator Emeritus

Dr. Hornbrook, a health economist, is a recognized expert in research focusing on the determinants of medical care utilization, expenditures, economic burden, health outcomes, comparative effectiveness, and cost effectiveness. He was the Chief Scientist at the Center for Health Research and served on the Board of Directors of the Health Care Systems Research Network (formerly HMORN) since its founding. He also served on the Executive Committee of the Cancer Research Network.

Dr. Hornbrook has published in many areas, including cost and utilization analysis, illness episode grouping methods, economic evaluation methods, patient classification models, health status measurement, predictive modeling, and health-based remuneration systems. His work has produced nearly 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters.

Greg Nichols, PhD

Senior Investigator Emeritus

Gregory Nichols, PhD, combines scientific training and policy vision with a hands-on understanding of the complexities of obtaining and analyzing health-utilization data. Dr. Nichols constructed Kaiser Permanente Northwest's Diabetes Registry in 1989 and has used it to conduct health services, economic, and epidemiologic research studies on patients before and after diabetes diagnosis. A recent focus of his work has been chronic kidney disease in type 2 diabetes (T2D), and the effect of delays in treatment intensification on complications of diabetes.

Other areas of interest include cardiovascular disease and the precursors to both diabetes and cardiovascular disease, commonly known as metabolic syndrome. Dr. Nichols recently led the creation of an 11-site diabetes registry that involves HMO research partners from around the United States. Other projects include studies of the association between hyperglycemia and cardiovascular disease, studies of diabetes incidence among patients with prediabetes, and a study assessing the proportion of patients with T2D who control cardiometabolic risk factors such as blood pressure, cholesterol level, and A1C, either alone or in combination, and their association with cardiovascular-disease hospitalization. Dr. Nichols participates in several multi-site studies that combine data from Kaiser Permanente Northwest and other Kaiser Permanente regions. Before becoming a CHR Investigator, Dr. Nichols served as a senior research associate at CHR, a rate analyst for Kaiser Permanente, and a financial analyst for the Northrop Corporation. He holds a PhD in public administration and policy from Portland State University and an MBA from Pepperdine University.

Nancy A. Perrin, PhD

Senior Investigator Emeritus

Nancy Perrin, PhD, is an expert in the application of multivariate statistical techniques to health outcomes. As part of her interest in working with "messy data,” she uses a variety of designs and statistical methods in her research. She specializes in longitudinal data and statistical modeling in her current collaborations on a number of National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded studies. Dr. Perrin has a 25 percent appointment at the Center for Health Research and 75 percent appointment at Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Perrin came to CHR from Oregon Health & Science University, where she was director of the statistical core. She retains an adjunct professor appointment there. A former professor and associate dean at Portland State University, Dr. Perrin received her BA from University of California, Los Angeles, and her master’s and doctoral degrees from Ohio State University.

David Smith, RPh, PhD

Senior Investigator Emeritus

David Smith, PhD, RPh, studies the economic evaluation of medical interventions and the natural history and burden of disease. He is involved in studies analyzing drug safety (opioid use and safety, cardiovascular drug safety), drug use and outcomes, and colorectal cancer screening.

Dr. Smith received his pharmacy degree from the University of Washington. After completing his residency in general/clinical pharmacy, he worked as a clinical pharmacist in home care. He received a master’s degree in health services administration and a PhD in pharmacy outcomes research from the University of Washington, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Health Economics at University of York (UK).

Dr. Smith is an adjunct faculty member at the University of Washington's School of Pharmacy and the Oregon State University College of Pharmacy.

Vic Stevens, PhD

Senior Investigator Emeritus

Victor Stevens, PhD, is a behavioral psychologist with 30 years of experience developing and evaluating health behavior change interventions.

This body of work has included interventions focused on weight loss, dietary change, physical activity, smoking cessation, and behavioral dentistry. In conjunction with this work, Dr. Stevens has conducted multiple studies on the integration of preventive medicine programs into routine medical care, and in the dissemination and evaluation of these interventions in clinical practice.

Dr. Stevens is a fellow in the Society of Behavioral Medicine and a fellow in The Obesity Society. In August 2008, he was appointed to serve on the Expert Panel for the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) Cardiovascular Risk Reduction Clinical Guidelines Initiative. As part of this work, he served on the Obesity Treatment Committee as well as the NHLBI Guidelines Implementation working group.

Dr. Stevens is an affiliate professor in the Department of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University.

Thomas M. Vogt

Senior Investigator Emeritus

As a student and then as a clinician, Dr. Vogt selected prevention as the nucleus of his research career at the Center for Health Research. His work has investigated improving prevention services in the medical care setting, the quality and costs of preventive care, primary care organization, and satisfaction with care across several states and multiple managed care systems. He has also studied the relation of personality to disease risk, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, and cancer in devising targeted approaches to reduce or prevent these diseases. 

From 1989 to 1997, Dr. Vogt directed CHR's epidemiology and disease prevention program in Portland before leaving to join the faculty of the Cancer Research Center at the University of Hawaii. He returned to CHR in 1999 to become the director of CHR's new Hawaii program. He stepped down from that role in 2007.

Dr. Vogt received his medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco, and an MS in public health from the University of California, at Berkeley. 

William M. Vollmer, PhD

Senior Investigator Emeritus

Dr. Vollmer conducts research in the areas of blood pressure and weight, dental caries, the epidemiology and management of asthma and pulmonary disease, and numerous others. He also leads a number of coordinating centers for which he steers the direction of multi-site trials and works collaboratively with other trial investigators to resolve complex protocol-related issues. Dr. Vollmer received his PhD in biostatistics from the University of Washington.