Veronica Irvin, Ph.D., MPH

Associate Professor, Celia Strickland Austin and G. Kenneth Austin III Endowed Professor in Public Health
veronica.irvin@oregonstate.edu

Office: 541-737-1074

2250 SW Jefferson Way

Corvallis, OR 97331

Location:

Curriculum Vitae:

Veronica Irvin, Ph.D., MPH (April 2022)

Profile Field Tabs

At OSU

Affiliation(s):

Health Promotion and Health Behavior

Public Health Practice

Health Care Workforce Needs Assessment

School of Social and Behavioral Health Sciences

Links:

Oregon's Public Health Advisory Board (PHAB)

OSU Well Water Program

Dimensions profile

ORCiD profile

Academic interests:

Dr. Irvin’s experience spans more than 15 years and she uses a community-engaged approach to develop, implement and evaluate behavior change programs across a comprehensive list of health priorities (e.g., smoking, nutrition, physical activity, cancer screening, safe drinking water). One of her primary areas of focus is breast cancer and cancer screening and the role of lay health navigators. Her research assessed longitudinal data from the Women’s Health Initiative and found that interval cancers detected within 1 year of a negative screen had increased tumor size, clinical stage and lymph node involvement and worse survival than screen-detected breast cancers (Irvin, JAMA Network Open, 2020). Little is known about women’s experience with interval breast cancer and if they encounter any barriers to care. Dr. Irvin received external pilot funding to work with the Samaritan Cancer Resource Center to document women’s and clinician’s experiences with interval breast cancers.

Dr. Irvin has translated her expertise in behavior change and her research experience with lay health navigators to the field of environmental health sciences. She was recently awarded an NIEHS grant (as co-PI with Molly Kile) to adapt and test the scalability of a behavior change intervention delivered by OSU Extension Service to work with well owners to treat wells contaminated with arsenic, nitrate or lead (R01 ES031669).

Biography

Dr. Irvin earned a MPH in Epidemiology from San Diego State University and a PhD in Public Health, Health Behavior from the joint program at UC San Diego and San Diego State University. She worked for 10 years at San Diego State University on NIH-funded behavioral epidemiological surveys and behavioral interventions. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship with the National Institutes of Health, Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research. While at NIH, she conducted comparative effectiveness analyses related to mammography screening, including a meta-analysis of quasi-experiments (and population-level estimates of non-normal results, follow-up care and diagnosis following mammography (Irvin, Kaplan et al, Women’s Health Issues, 2015). She assessed the effects of trial registration on primary outcome reporting among large-budget cardio-vascular interventions (Kaplan & Irvin, Plos One, 2015; Irvin & Kaplan, Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 2015). She joined the College of Public Health and Human Sciences at OSU in 2014. Dr. Irvin has broad experience in NIH-funded research in tobacco control, nutrition, physical activity, bone health, cancer and environmental health exposures.

Beyond OSU