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Biographies (organized alphabetically)

Elijah Anderson
Elijah Anderson is the Lanman Professor of Sociology at Yale University. An expert on the sociology of black America, he is the author of the classic sociological work, A Place on the Corner: A Study of Black Street Corner Men (1978; 2003) and numerous articles on the black experience, including "Of Old Heads and Young Boys: Notes on the Urban Black Experience" (1986), commissioned by the National Research Council's Committee on the Status of Black Americans, "Sex Codes and Family Life among Inner-City Youth" (1989), and "The Code of the Streets," which was the cover story in the May 1994 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

For his ethnographic study Streetwise: Race, Class and Change in an Urban Community (1990), he was honored with the Robert E. Park Award, for the best published book in the area of Urban Sociology, of the American Sociological Association. Dr. Anderson authored the “Introduction” to the republication of The Philadelphia Negro by W.E.B. DuBois (1996), and his expanded version of the Atlantic piece, The Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City, published by W.W. Norton (1999), he was honored with the Karmarovsky Award of the Eastern Sociological Society. Professor Anderson has served as Visiting Professor at Swarthmore College, Yale University, and Princeton University. In addition, he has also won the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching at Penn and was named the Robin M. Williams, Jr., Distinguished Lecturer for 1999-2000 by the Eastern Sociological Association.

He has made appearances on national news programs, including the Jim Lehrer Newshour. Dr. Anderson is director of the Philadelphia Ethnography Project, associate editor of Qualitative Sociology, and other professional journals, a member of the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and Vice President of the American Sociological Association. He was a member of the National Research Council's Panel on the Understanding and Control of Violent Behavior, which published its report in 1993. Other topics with which he concerns himself are the social psychology of organizations, field methods of social research, social interaction, and social organization. He received a B.A. degree from Indiana University, an M.A. degree from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. degree from Northwestern University, where he was a Ford Foundation Fellow. Professor Anderson is the past Vice President of the American Sociological Association.

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Kathy Charmaz
Kathy Charmaz is Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of the Faculty Writing Program at Sonoma State University. In the latter position, she leads seminars for faculty to help them complete their research and scholarly writing. She has written or co-edited seven books including Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide Through Qualitative Analysis, which recently received a Critics’ Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association and Good Days, Bad Days: The Self in Chronic Illness and Time, which won awards from the Pacific Sociological Association and the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. Her co-edited volume, Antony Bryant and Kathy Charmaz (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Grounded Theory, appeared in 2007. Professor Charmaz is one of five co-authors of the forthcoming volume, Grounded Theory: The Second Generation. She has also published numerous articles and chapters on the experience of chronic illness, the social psychology of suffering, writing for publication, and grounded theory and qualitative research. She has served as President of the Pacific Sociological Association, Vice-President of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, Vice-President of Alpha Kappa Delta, the international honorary for sociology, editor of Symbolic Interaction, and Chair of the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. She has received the 2001 Feminist Mentors Award and the 2006 George Herbert Mead award for lifetime achievement from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction.

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John W. Creswell
John W. Creswell is a Professor of Educational Psychology and teaches courses and writes about qualitative methodology and mixed methods research. He has been at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for 30 years and has authored 11 books, many of which focus on research design, qualitative research, and mixed methods research. In addition, he co-Directs the Office of Qualitative and Mixed Methods Research at Nebraska that provides support for scholars incorporating qualitative and mixed methods research into projects for extramural funding. He serves as the founding Co-Editor for the Sage journal, Journal of Mixed Methods Research, and he has been an Adjunct Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Michigan and assisted investigators in the Department of Veterans Affairs health sciences on the research methodology for their projects. He has recently been selected to be a Senior Fulbright Scholar and will be working in South Africa in October, 2008, bringing mixed methods to social scientists and to developers of documentaries about AIDS victims and families. He plays the piano, writes poetry, and actively engages in sports.

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Leslie Curry
Leslie Curry, PhD, MPH, is Senior Scientist at the Yale School of Public Health and Core Faculty of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program at Yale. Her research interests include three overlapping areas with particular emphasis on older adults: approaches to improve the quality of health care; patient experiences with health and the health care system; and trends in health insurance coverage and benefits. She is particularly committed to applied policy research, with a primary objective of informing the development of health policy at the state and national levels. She is a recognized expert in qualitative and mixed methods and has served as co-PI on a series of grants awarded by NIA, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the John A Hartford Foundation designed to enhance the rigor and credibility of qualitative and mixed methods in aging and public health research. Together with colleagues from Brown, Dr. Curry conceived, developed and implemented two national training conferences on this topic, and was lead editor of a reference text published in 2006 by the American Public Health Association and Gerontological Society of America: Curry L, Shield R, Wetle T. (Eds.) Improving Aging and Public Health Research: Qualitative and Mixed Methods.

Dr. Curry has extensive experience teaching qualitative research methods at the graduate and postgraduate levels and mentoring RWJ Clinical Scholars conducting qualitative and mixed methods studies. Dr. Curry also serves on editorial boards of several aging journals, and regularly conducts reviews for many others, particularly for manuscripts reporting qualitative or mixed methods studies. She is the former Director of the Braceland Center for Mental Health and Aging, a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and a member of AcademyHealth.

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Carolyn Ellis
Professor of Communication and Sociology, University of South Florida.
Co-Author (with Arthur Bochner): Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing; Ethnographically Speaking: Autoethnography, Literature, and Aesthetics.

Author: Final Negotiations: A Story of Love, Loss, and Chronic Illness; The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Teaching and Doing Autoethnography.

In press book: Revision: Autoethnographic Reflections on Life and Work

Author of two other edited collections and over one hundred articles and chapters on personal narrative, autoethnography, and qualitative methods.

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Alison Hamilton
Alison Hamilton, Ph.D., is an Assistant Research Anthropologist in the Department of Psychiatry at UCLA and a Health Sciences Specialist at the West Los Angeles VA. She has been a consultant for ResearchTalk for over eight years. Dr. Hamilton currently has an NIH Career Development Award (NIDA K01) to study women methamphetamine users and sexuality. As part of her award, she is also pursuing a Master’s in Public Health in Community Health Sciences at UCLA. Her specialty areas are substance abuse, mental health, women’s health, evaluation research, and quality improvement. Dr. Hamilton provides trainings and consultation on a wide variety of topics related to qualitative research methods (particularly qualitative data analysis), and she has published several articles on her research.

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Valerie Janesick
Valerie J. Janesick (Ph.D. Michigan State University) is Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, University of South Florida, Tampa. She teaches classes in Qualitative Research Methods, Curriculum Theory and Inquiry, Foundations of Curriculum, Ethics and Educational Leadership and Program Evaluation. Her texts, The Assessment Debate: A Reference Handbook (2001) and Curriculum Trends: A Reference Handbook (2003) ABC-CLIO Publications are also available in E Book Format. Her text, Stretching Exercises for Qualitative Researchers 2nd edition, (2004) Sage Publications has been completely revamped since its first edition in 1998. She has recently completed the text, Authentic Assessment: A Primer, for Peter Lang Publishers. (2006). Her work has been published in Curriculum Inquiry, Qualitative Inquiry, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, The Qualitative Report, and other major journals. Her chapters in the Handbook of Qualitative Research 1st edition and 2nd edition use Dance and the Arts as a metaphor for understanding research. She is currently taking classes in Yoga and Pilates. Her earlier life as an elementary and middle school teacher and head teacher inspired her to integrate the arts in all her work.

Recent Writing:
She has recently completed the chapter titled, “Critical Moves: Interpreting Aesthetics for the Qualitative Researcher with lessons learned from John Dewey and Erick Hawkins” in Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples, and Issues. (Eds.) J. Gary Knowles and Ardra L. Cole. (2007) Sage Publishers, and has an article accepted for The Qualitative Report (2008) titled: “Shall we dance? Issues for the Qualitative Researcher when interfacing with the Institutional Review Board, IRB”. Look for her next book: Composing Oral History: Artistic reflections for the Qualitative Researcher (2009) Guilford Publications.

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Ray Maietta
Dr. Raymond C. Maietta is president of ResearchTalk Inc., a qualitative research consulting company in Bohemia, New York. A Ph.D. sociologist from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Ray’s interests in the art of qualitative research methods motivated him to start ResearchTalk in 1996. ResearchTalk Inc. provides advice on all phases of qualitative analysis to university, government, not-for-profit and corporate researchers. Work with ResearchTalk clients using qualitative software informs recent publications: “Systematic Procedures of Inquiry and Computer Data Analysis Software for Qualitative Research” (co-authored with John Creswell, Handbook of Research Design and Social Measurement, Sage 2002) and “State of the Art: Integrating Software with Qualitative Analysis” (in Leslie Curry, Renee Shield and Terrie Wetle, (Eds.) Applying Qualitative and Mixed Methods in Aging and Public Health Research. Washington, DC: American Public Health Association and the Gerontological Society of America 2006). More than 12 years of consultation with qualitative researchers informs the methods book Dr. Maietta is writing. Sort and Sift, Think and Shift will be completed in 2009.

Ray’s work invites interactions with researchers from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. He is an active participant at conferences around the country including invited presentations at American Evaluation Association, American Anthropological Association, and American Sociological Association.

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Paul Mihas
Paul Mihas supports qualitative research and text-analysis software at the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the former managing editor of Social Forces, a journal of sociology published at the University of North Carolina Press. He has been with ResearchTalk since 2001 as a qualitative analysis consultant. Mihas received an M.A. (1989) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has given presentations on qualitative methods at several universities, including the University of Puerto Rico and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His interests include memo writing as a stand-alone method; his qualitative research focuses on cancer survivors and metaphors for illness and the body.

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Patricia Pugliani
Dr. Patricia Pugliani, an Assistant Professor of Research Surgery at the medical school at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is a true mixed methods researcher. As a sociologist, her research interests include sexuality, HIV/AIDS, and gender-related issues, and she has recently completed a study on the social implications of knowing a person with HIV/AIDS. Dr. Pugliani’s current work in the medical school involves clinical research in the Department of Surgical Oncology, membership in the Melanoma Disease Management Team, quantitative data analysis, questionnaire design, and grant writing as well as scholarly writing. In an editorial capacity she assisted in the completion of two volumes of Surgical Oncology Clinics of North America, related to palliative care of oncology patients and gastric cancer.

Dr. Pugliani also serves as a qualitative research consultant with ResearchTalk. In this capacity she has assisted in the analysis of a range of qualitative studies and teaches qualitative researchers to integrate ATLAS.ti and MAXQDA into their work. She plays an active role in the evolution of ResearchTalk's teaching approach and development of teaching materials.

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Debra Skinner
Debra Skinner received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1990. She is a Senior Scientist at the FPG Child Development Institute, Adjunct Professor in the Department of Anthropology, and Associate Director of the Center for Genomics and Society at UNC. Dr. Skinner has many years’ experience conducting ethnographic research, beginning with dissertation and post-doctoral work in Nepal on children’s developing identities within changing sociohistorical worlds. She has been PI or co-PI of numerous federally funded, large-scale, interdisciplinary research projects that employ ethnographic/qualitative methods or integrate qualitative and quantitative approaches. Examples of this research include families’ understandings of and adaptations to childhood disability and genetic disorders; child and family health and well-being in contexts of poverty and disability; children’s constructions of race, ethnic, and other social identities in the school context; and the social implications of genetic research. She is currently working to examine a range of ethical, legal, and social issues associated with expanded newborn screening, especially for fragile X syndrome. In her extensive publications on these topics, Dr. Skinner demonstrates a variety of qualitative analysis techniques and models for integrating qualitative and quantitative approaches. She also consults with researchers and teaches seminars in the U.S. and abroad on designing research projects that incorporate qualitative methods. In these activities, she draws upon her own extensive research experience to provide the conceptual and practical tools needed to plan and conduct large-scale, longitudinal ethnographic or mixed method projects. A list of her current research projects and recent publications can be viewed at http://www.fpg.unc.edu/people/fpg_people.cfm?staffID=87 and http://genomics.unc.edu/genomicsandsociety/html/debra_skinner.html.

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