Bruce Rapkin, Ph.D. is Professor and Head of the Division of Community Collaboration and Implementation in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He has secondary appointments in Health Psychology and in Family and Social Medicine. Dr. Rapkin is a community psychologist, focusing on access to care and quality of life for diverse, medically-underserved patients, families and communities. His primary emphasis is on the development of community-academic partnerships to reduce barriers and improve standard of care. He has led a series of projects to develop strategies to promote evidence-based practice through collaborative research. The first such project was the Family Access to Care Study, an NIMH-sponsored study (R01-MH063045) of the feasibility of partnerships between frontline providers and health researchers, to disseminate mental health interventions for families. The second is the Queens Library HealthLink Project, to promote community organization, cancer education and outreach to diverse underserved communities in conjunction with the Queens Borough Public Library System (R01-CA119991). He is also the principal investigator of the recently completed HIV Choices in Care Study, a study of Medicaid patients’ access to care and quality of life, sponsored by the New York State Department of Health AIDS Institute. Dr. Rapkin’s collaborative research with community organizations and health providers has led to the development of new research designs and assessment methodology to promote evidenced-based interventions in public health. In particular, he has been working on participatory approaches that use both process and outcomes data to support community-based interventions. Dr. Rapkin is a member of the NIMH Consortium on HIV/AIDS and the Family and serves on the American Cancer Society’s National Council for Extramural Research. In 2005, he co-chaired the annual NIMH Conference on the Role of the Family in Preventing and Adapting to HIV/AIDS held in Brooklyn, New York.

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