Our Team

The strength of SRA-NYC lies in our multidisciplinary team. SRA-NYC has in-house expertise and a dynamic network of consulting experts. Team members have been trained at leading research institutions and offer expertise in the full complement of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. Research teams are assembled on a project by project basis depending upon required areas of expertise.

Founding Director

Dr. Jodie Abbatangelo-Gray, Sc.D., M.S., M.A., has led a number of academic and applied social science research initiatives, including an historical analysis of pre- and post-revolutionary healthcare in Cuba (based in Havana, Cuba in contract with Partner’s in Health, MA) and campaign and program planning for early education initiatives (Bach Institute for Research, NYC and Sesame Workshop, NYC). Evaluation research experience also includes planning and implementation work for the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) NYC-based five borough environmental health project: “Community stressors and susceptibility to air pollution in urban asthma” study, as well as a systematic review of injury prevention control programs across U.S. Departments of Public Health (AED, DC). She recently wrote a white paper examining the Population Council’s HIV prevention/female empowerment initiatives and policies in Ethiopia (Population Council, NYC).

As a behavioral science and health communication specialist for UNICEF and CDC, Dr. Abbatangelo-Gray has led country-wide avian flu and HIV/AIDS emergency response communication planning and research efforts and drafted official state emergency plans for Bulgaria, Azerbaijan, Nigeria and the Republic of Georgia.  She has also lectured on theory-driven health communication for emergency response in Bulgaria and Kenya and delivered core lectures on communications surveillance and behavior change for the 2006 APEC meetings in DaNang, Vietnam. More recently, she delivered to communication experts from the AIDS Institute of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYC DOHMH) a workshop on scientific approaches to message development using CDC’s “Message Works.” She also recently published a seminal article in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior on the evaluation of social marketing campaigns, entitled: “Evaluating MyPlate: An Expanded Framework Using Traditional and Nontraditional Metrics for Assessing Health Communication Campaigns” (Booz, Allen, Hamilton).  She currently serves as a contributing member to the national expert panel for health communications within CDC’s Division of Cancer Prevention and Control.

Other social marketing campaign experience includes the Legacy Foundation’s teen anti-tobacco Truth campaign, CDC’s autism awareness campaign, the Massachusetts DPH’s folic acid campaign, a drunk driving prevention campaign targeting Hispanics for Voices of McDowell in NC, and the University of North Carolina’s childhood obesity prevention initiative to raise awareness and inspire action among policy makers. She has also led consumer research, campaign strategy, brand positioning and communications efforts as a consumer psychologist/senior campaign strategist for Ogilvy and Mather (NYC) and Euro (NYC), supporting companies such as Pfizer, Merck, Boeringer and Ingelheim and (formerly) Wyeth. Before leaving Ogilvy and Mather she was appointed Director of their multicultural consumer insight group, “Planeta.” 

Dr. Abbatangelo-Gray received both her Doctoral and Masters of Science degrees at the Harvard School of Public Health within the Department of Health and Social Behavior. Her academic concentrations included behavioral change theory, medical anthropology, social marketing and epidemiology. She also holds a Master’s degree in Social Science Research from the University of Chicago, with concentrations in Medical Anthropology, Latin American studies and qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. In addition, she possesses a Bachelor’s degree in English and Fine Arts, and regularly applies her creative conceptualization and writing skills to the marketing campaigns that she has helped develop and launch. She has studied, lived and worked in Europe, Latin America, Africa, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, and currently resides in Manhattan with her husband Tom, her son Zachary Francis and her daughter Francesca Rose.