Alissa Perrucci ('02), PhD, MPH is the Program Evaluation Manager at the California Family Health Council (CFHC) in Berkeley. CFHC is a not-for-profit organization working to improve the health of California families by strengthening the quality of and access to family planning and reproductive health care services throughout California. At CFHC, Dr. Perrucci evaluates sexual and reproductive health programs for women, men and youth funded by Title X and other federal and private grants. She has a PhD in clinical psychology from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and an MPH from UC Berkeley. At Duquesne, she studied existential-phenomenological psychology, with an emphasis on qualitative methods. At UC Berkeley, she investigated factors associated with delay in receiving abortion care. Her current research focuses on the impact of policy on women’s and minors’ access to reproductive health services, the relationship between privacy and subjectivit, and the role of stigma in women’s experiences of abortion.

Padmini Parthasarathy ('02), MPH is a Senior Health Education Specialist with Contra Costa Health Services’ Family, Maternal and Child Health Programs. Her work includes grant writing, planning, implementation and evaluation for a variety of projects on children’s oral health, access to care and perinatal health issues. Padmini has been an active March of Dimes volunteer for over 14 years. Locally, she serves as the Chair of the Bay Area Division Public Affairs Committee, Volunteer Coordinator for WalkAmerica in Contra Costa County, and as a member of the Bay Area Division Board, Bay Area Grants Review Committee and California State Public Affairs Committee. In addition, Padmini was recently appointed by the President of the March of Dimes to two new national groups: the National Volunteer Leadership Council, a board overseeing the foundation’s National Volunteer Leadership Institute, and the Generation Next Project Committee, a team developing recommendations to the President for developing the foundation’s youth and young professional volunteer base. Padmini received her Master’s in Public Health in Maternal and Child Health from the University of California, Berkeley, and her B.A. in Psychology and Social Behavior and Minor in Sociology from the University of California, Irvine.

Kristen Marchi ('93), MPH, began working with Drs. Paula Braveman and Susan Egerter in 1993 and has since then been co-investigator on a series of studies of disparities in MCH. Ms. Marchi has a unique combination of outstanding organizational and coordinating skills together with excellence as a researcher. She is an experienced project director, having coordinated large and complex research efforts involving inter-agency collaboration with the Indian Health Service, the California Department of Health Services, WIC, community-based organizations and large medical centers in California; she was project director of our 1994-95 ATM survey for which a statewide representative sample of over 10,000 postpartum women were interviewed face-to-face in 19 hospitals throughout the State. She is a co-investigator on the CDC/ATPM and Kaiser Family Foundation project on socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities in 4 MCH outcomes, and the project director for California's Maternal and Infant Health Assessment (MIHA), an ongoing population-based survey of postpartum women in California conducted in collaboration with the California State Department of Health Services. She has strong quantitative skills and is an expert data analyst; she has worked with large secondary data bases including the NHIS, MEPS, California vital statistics, Census data and the Demographic and Health Surveys (MCH surveys conducted in developing countries), as well as the ATM and MIHA surveys. She also has experience with qualitative research methods including focus groups. Ms. Marchi has played a major role in providing technical assistance (e.g., regarding research design and analytic methods) to research fellows and students working with our research team, as well as to researchers in state and local agencies.