Department of Health Promotion and Education Faculty

Please meet our primary faculty and staff. We welcome your emails, phone calls, and visits to our program.

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Naomi Modeste, DrPH, CHES

• Department Chair and Professor, Health Promotion and Education
• Coordinator for DrPH and MPH in Health Education Programs

Dr. Modeste completed her doctoral work in health education, focusing on hypertension in the Caribbean. She is an experienced administrator, health educator, researcher, and consultant with over 30 yrs of service in her field. This includes training of health professionals, and conducting workshops and seminars in the Caribbean and Latin American territories. She has been working in this department for the last 18 years teaching core classes, researching, publishing, and mentoring doctoral and MPH students in health education and has been the chair of the department for the last 3 years. She is widely published and has 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

Patti Herring, PhD, MA, RN

• Associate Professor, Health Promotion and Education
• Coordinator for MPH Health Education Field Practicums
• Liaison/Coordinator for Adventist Health Studies-Black/African American Adventists

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

Joyce Hopp, PhD, MPH, RN, CHES

• Distinguished Professor, Health Promotion and Education
• Former Dean, School of Allied Health Professions

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

Jerry W. Lee, PhD, MA, RN

• Professor, Health Promotion and Education
• Associate Faculty, Psychology

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 80 doctoral dissertation committees, and been an author on over 70 published papers, more than 60 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

Helen Hopp Marshak, PhD, MS, MCHES

• Associate Professor, Health Promotion and Education
• Associate Professor, Psychology
• Associate Dean, Academic Affairs

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 15 years, as well as other health promotion programs including those in nutrition education, transitional counseling services for prisoners, dental services, and Medi-Cal outreach projects. She was part of the initial test item writing team on the National Board of Public Health Examiners (NPHE) for the Certified in Public Health (CPH) Exam. She serves as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the School of Public Health.

Research interests: evaluation of tobacco control and other health promotion programs, psychosocial aspects of a variety of health behaviors.

E-mail: hhoppmarshak@llu.edu
LLU Faculty Profile: http://www.llu.edu/pages/faculty/directory/faculty.html?uid=hhoppmarshak

Susanne Montgomery, PhD, MPH

• Professor, Department of Health Promotion and Education
• Professor, Department of Global Health
• Professor, Department of Preventive Medicine
• Director, Center for Health Research
• Director, Community Outreach and Partnership Core, Loma Linda University, School of Medicine, Center for Health Disparities Research and Molecular Medicine

Professor Montgomery’s current work concerns social and behavioral causes of poor health in hard-to-access populations. Her research interests and work center on addressing health disparities, chronic disease prevention, HIV/AIDS, and teen pregnancy—focusing on community-based participatory research techniques in conducting translational research. As Director of the Center for Health Research, she mentors faculty and students in identifying research opportunities and developing grant applications. She is an accomplished NIH- and CDC-funded researcher, a member of the “Behavioral And Social Science Approaches To Preventing HIV/AIDS Study Section” of the NIH Center for Scientific Review, and a reviewer for several peer-review journals. Dr. Montgomery received a German graduate degree in Nutritional Science from the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, and her Master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Michigan in health behavior with an emphasis in social epidemiology. Prior to joining the School of Public Health in 1995, she held faculty appointments at the University of Southern California and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Research Interests: health disparities; chronic disease prevention; HIV/AIDS; and teen pregnancy.

E-mail: smontgomery@llu.edu

Hildemar Dos Santos, MD, DrPH, CHES, ACSM

• Assistant Professor, Health Promotion and Education

Dr. Dos Santos has practiced as a missionary doctor in Brazil for 14 years. He finished his master in public health in 1994 and DrPH in preventive care in 1999, both at the Loma Linda University School of Public Health. Dr. Dos Santos worked as a missionary in Hong Kong, China for 6 years as the director of the health promotion department at Hong Kong and Tsuen Wan Adventists Hospitals.

Dr. Dos Santos is entirely committed to community health and has organized and participated in health fairs, lectures and seminars in churches and community settings. He has especially been involved in health programs for the Hispanic community. He is the designer and presenter of the Cancer Prevention Seminar for the Health Summit program at the North American Division of Seventh-day Adventists both in Spanish and English. He has also presented a course on childhood obesity for the Chilean Adventist University in Chillan, Chile in 2009.

He is in charge of the internship program for the Preventive Care doctoral students and he is also the director of the Smoking Cessation Clinic at the Center for Health Promotion and the Drayson Center Wellness Clinic, where students can practice their preventive care skills. Dr. Dos Santos teaches courses on smoking cessation, substance abuse prevention, stress management and prevention of lifestyle related diseases.

Research interests: childhood obesity, lifestyle and diseases, community programs.

E-mail: hdossantos@llu.edu

Serena Tonstad, MD, PhD, MPH

• Professor, Health Promotion and Education
• Professor, Preventive Medicine, School of Medicine
• Coordinator for DrPH Preventive Care

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 School 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

Daniel Handysides, DrPH, MPH

• Assistant Professor, Health Promotion and Education

Dr. Daniel Handysides is a fourth generation Adventist who was born to missionary parents in Lesotho, Southern Africa. He moved to Toronto, Canada at age 7 and completed high school there. He attended Andrews University obtaining a BS in Zoology. It was at Andrews that he met his beautiful wife, Sandra. After Andrews University, Daniel spent 12 months living and working with the Miskito Indians in the rainforests of northeastern Nicaragua. Returning to the U.S.A., he completed both an MPH in Environmental Public Health, and a DrPH in Health Education at Loma Linda University. Currently he is holding dual appointments at both LLU-SPH and the United Arab Emirates University: Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. At both universities he holds an assistant professor appointment. He has a passion for helping the under served and disadvantaged.

Research interests: risk perceptions, behavior change, high-risk behaviors, and program sustanability

E-mail: dhandysides@llu.edu

Peter Gleason, PhD

• Assistant Professor, Health Promotion and Education

Dr. Gleason comes to us from New England, where he earned his BS in psychology from Atlantic Union College in 2003. More recently, he has be awarded a MA in Experimental Psychology from Loma Linda University in 2009, and his PhD in Clinical Psychology in 2011. Dr. Gleason has distinguished himself through years of clinical work in a variety of settings, including substance abuse hospitals, non-public special education schools, the LLU Children’s Hospital, neuropsychological assessment clinics, and others. Dr. Gleason’s research interests include high-risk behaviors, perceptions toward quality of care, adolescent populations, addictive behaviors, automatic behaviors, learning disabilities, and relationship dynamics.

E-mail: pgleason@llu.edu

Amber Andrade

• Administrative Assistant

E-mail: aandrade@llu.edu