Alison B. Hamilton, Ph.D., M.P.H., a VA Research Career Scientist and Professor-in-Residence in the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, received her Ph.D. in medical and psychological anthropology from UCLA in 2002, and her M.P.H. in Community Health Sciences from UCLA in 2009.

Dr. Hamilton is the Implementation Research Director at the VA Health Systems Research Center for the Study of Healthcare Innovation, Implementation and Policy at the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, specializing in women Veterans’ health, mental health services research, and implementation science. She directs the VA-funded EMPOWER (Enhancing Mental and Physical Health of Women through Engagement and Retention) Quality Enhancement Research Initiative (QUERI), focused on improving women Veterans’ health and health care through implementation science. At UCLA she directs the Semel Institute Implementation Science and Practice Hub and the NIAID-funded UCLA Rapid, Rigorous, Relevant Implementation Science Hub. She is also an Honorary Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She was a fellow in the inaugural cohort of the NIMH/VA Implementation Research Institute and she serves as an Associate Editor for Implementation Science Communications and on the editorial boards of Implementation Science (BMC), Women’s Health Issues (Elsevier), and Implementation Research and Practice (Sage).

Dr. Hamilton has been a consultant with ResearchTalk for over 25 years, providing direct support to clients as well as serving as faculty for several of the Qualitative Research Summer Intensives and mentor at ResearchTalk’s Qualitative Methods Camps. At recent Intensives, she has taught courses on qualitative methods in implementation research, rapid qualitative research methods, qualitative grant-writing, qualitative interviewing, integrated mixed methods research, and enhancing the usefulness of qualitative research. Dr. Hamilton is a co-author on two articles that provide an overview of the Sort and Sift approach: “Sort and Sift, Think and Shift: Let the Data Be Your Guide: An Applied Approach to Working with, Learning from, and Privileging Qualitative Data” – 2021 (https://nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr/vol26/iss6/20/), and “The Sort and Sift, Think and Shift Analysis Method” in Richards, K. A., Hemphill, M. A., & Wright, P. M. (Eds.) (2024) Qualitative research and evaluation in physical education and sport pedagogy, Jones & Bartlett Learning. She is also a co-author on Dr. Ray Maietta’s Sort and Sift, Think and Shift book (forthcoming, Guilford). She recently published Pragmatic Healthcare Ethnography (Routledge, 2024) with Drs. Gemmae Fix and Erin Finley.