Please meet our primary faculty and staff. We welcome your emails, phone calls, and visits to our program.
Dr. Modeste completed her doctoral work in health education, focusing on hypertension in the Caribbean. She has over 18 years of experience administering health education programs and departments, training health professionals, and conducting workshops and seminars in the Caribbean and Latin American territories. She has been working in this department for the last 15 years teaching core classes, researching, publishing, and mentoring doctoral and MPH students in health education. She authored the first Dictionary of Public Health Promotion and Education and co-authored a 2nd edition.
Research interests: women’s health, breast cancer, care giving and caregiver burden, tobacco and alcohol use during pregnancy, and HIV/AIDS.
E-mail: nmodeste@llu.edu
Dr. Herring is a Pacific Union College trained registered nurse who completed her master's at the University of Texas at Dallas, and her PhD in health education at Texas Woman’s University. Her dissertation was a study comparing the health beliefs and health promotion activities of Black and White women. She is the director for Black recruitment for the Adventist Health Study-2 and travels nation-wide recruiting members into the study.
Research interests: minority health.
E-mail: pherring@llu.edu
Dr. Hopp teaches in the area of professional writing as well as advanced seminars in health promotion and education. Her active areas of interest are the history of health education, current issues in health education, administration of higher education, and career guidance. She is a published author of professional and popular articles, books, and elementary health texts, and she served on editorial boards of three health journals and as reviewer for six journals.
E-mail: jhopp@llu.edu
Dr. Lee became an RN in 1973 based on his Army training and experience and received a PhD in experimental social psychology in 1976 from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Since joining the HPRO faculty in 1983 he has served as Director of the School of Public Health Computer Center, Interim Director of the Center for Health Research, and Associate Chair and Chair of the Department of Health Promotion and Education. He has engaged in wide-ranging research consultation, served on or chaired more than 70 doctoral dissertation committees, and been an author on over 60 published papers, more than 50 of which are in refereed journals.
Research interests: religion and health, filial values and caregiving, cross-cultural research methodology. The theory of planned behavior and health behavior and addictive behaviors.
E-mail: jlee@llu.edu
Dr. Helen Hopp Marshak is a social psychologist who applies her interest and background in behavioral science to public health. She has served as an evaluation consultant for several tobacco control projects in California for 8 years, as well as other programs including those in nutrition education, transitional counseling services for prisoners, dental services, and Medi-Cal outreach projects. She serves as Vice Chair of the LLU Institutional Review Board that evaluates applications for research on human subjects.
Research interests: evaluation of tobacco control programs, psychosocial aspects of health behaviors.
E-mail: hhoppmarshak@llu.edu
Dr. Montgomery completed her doctoral training in health behavior with an emphasis in social epidemiology at the University of Michigan. Throughout her career she has been committed to studying social and behavioral causes of poor health in hard-to-access populations including homeless and runaway youth, young adult injection drug users, men at risk for AIDS, teens at risk for teen pregnancy, STIs, alcohol and drug abuse, and adult minority populations with respect to health disparities research. She is a member of an NIH review study section, a reviewer for a number of peer review journals, and has been the recipient of several federal and state grants.
Research interests: Health disparities research, HIV/AIDS, community participatory action research, and mixed methods research.
E-mail: smontgomery@llu.edu
Dr. Dos Santos worked as a physician in Brazil for 14 years. For seven years he was a CEO and Clinical Director of the Sao Roque Adventist Clinic in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The clinic was a 30-bed lifestyle center specialized in the prevention and treatment of lifestyle related diseases such as diabetes, cholesterol, heart disease, weight control, and addiction to alcohol and drugs.
In 1992, Dr. Dos Santos moved to Loma Linda University and in 1994 he finished his master's in nutrition and health promotion and education at the Loma Linda University School of Public Health. In 1999, he finished his DrPH at LLU with a major in preventive care. His dissertation was about the influence of acculturation on the smoking behavior of Portuguese immigrants in California.
From 2001 to 2007, Dr. Dos Santos went to Hong Kong to work as the director of the Lifestyle Management Center at Hong Kong Adventist Hospital and Tsuen Wan Adventist Hospital. During this period he ran several health programs such as the Funfit Weight Control Program, Adventist Hospital Fitness and Running Club, Newstart Program, and the Vegetarian Cooking Certificate Program. He was a main health speaker for the city's Rotary Clubs, schools, churches, community centers, and corporations. He was also an adjunct teacher at the Hong Kong Adventist College for the health education program.
Dr. Dos Santos has done research to assess the progress of the participants in his weight control program. He conducted the Hypertension and Lifestyle Survey among hypertensive patients in Hong Kong. He also conducted a study with the participants in the Newstart health trip (Thailand and Taiwan) checking for the benefits of the program on cholesterol levels. The results were presented at the 1st Asian Congress of Sports Marketing and at the 1st Asian International Congress on Cardiac Rehabilitation, both in Hong Kong. Results were also published in the book Marketing Sport and Physical Activity: A twenty-first century priority - Edited by Frank H. Fu, Robert Robertson (2006), and in the Journal of Hong Kong College of Cardiology, December 2006.
E-mail: hdossantos@llu.edu
Dr. Tonstad completed her medical training at Loma Linda University in 1979 and a residency in Preventive Medicine in 1990. She is board certified by the American Board of Preventive Medicine. She completed a PhD in the field of Preventive Medicine (topic: treatment of hypercholesterolemia in children) granted by the University of Oslo in 1997. She has dedicated her career to the preventive care of patients with lifestyle related disorders including tobacco addiction, obesity and the metabolic syndrome and lipid disorders. She is actively involved in research in these areas and has more than 150 peer-reviewed publications to her credit. She has taught at the Department of Nutrition at the University of Oslo since 1999 and was engaged as the head physician at the Department of Preventive Cardiology at Ullevaal University Hospital in Oslo, Norway since 1997. She continues to be involved in research and teaching in Norway in a secondary position as she commences a new chapter as a professor at the Schools of Public Health and Medicine at Loma Linda University.
Research interests: cardiovascular disease prevention and epidemiology, treatment of obesity, and tobacco addiction
E-mail: stonstad@llu.edu
Ms. Watson is a helpful and efficient individual who manages the department while providing assistance to students, faculty, and staff.
E-mail: dmwatson@llu.edu
Last Revised: Tue, Apr 01, 2008
