Brandi Barnes
Project: Carnegie Classification Toolkit for IIN
Research Interests:
- preventing stigma in accessing mental health care services and barriers to treatment,
- substance use disorder treatment and research
- community health workers and their importance to providing community care and service linkage
Brandi Barnes, PhD is a Research Scientist at the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute (IHSI) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her primary role is to work with faculty, administration, and external stakeholders to identify, expand, and support new initiatives aimed at reducing disparate health outcomes. She achieves this by facilitating collaborative research proposals and by organizing campus and community events, programs, and workshops. Dr. Barnes brings a rigorous public health lens to research development, proposal writing, community-engaged scholarship, and data-informed strategic planning. She is also an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Health and Kinesiology. Dr. Barnes has a background in health promotion and health education program implementation and evaluation from her prior experience at a behavioral health treatment and research center. She earned her bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her doctoral degree is in community health with a specialization in health psychology. Her research areas of interest include preventing stigma in accessing mental health care services and barriers to treatment as well as substance use disorder treatment research.