Community Voices Building Healthier Choices Together A New Era of Citizen Science

Abby C. King, PhD,  recipient of Stanford’s David and Susan Heckerman Endowed Professorship, is Faculty Director of the Health-enhancing Action Research & Technology Solutions (HARTS) Lab and the Our Voice Citizen Science Research Initiative and Global Network. Her research focuses on the development, evaluation, and translation of public health interventions to reduce noncommunicable and communicable diseases and their risk factors. She uses state-of-the-art communication technologies, community-based participatory research methods, and citizen science approaches to address health for all worldwide. She has served on numerous government taskforces in the U.S. and abroad, and was one of 10 U.S. scientists honored by the Association of American Medical Colleges in 2014 for outstanding research supporting health for all.

Maja Pedersen, PhD  is Associate Professor in the School of Public and Community Health at the University of Montana in Missoula, Montana, USA. Dr. Pedersen uses participatory research approaches such as community-based participatory research and citizen science to develop, implement, evaluate, and translate public health interventions. She has engaged in training as a Fulbright Scholar to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway; a U.S. State Department Sports Diplomacy Delegate to Peru, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Prevention Research Center at Stanford University. She focuses on health promotion, particularly in the areas of active living, social connection, and food and nutrition security. She uses a social ecological framework to address influences on health beyond the individual, and qualitative and quantitative methods to ensure her research process and outcomes are both scientifically meaningful and reflective of community-based priorities.