Heather Hanna
Heather Hanna, M.S.
Project Director and Research Fellow
Social Science Research Center, Mississippi State University
heather.hanna@ssrc.msstate.edu
Office (662) 325-8102
Ms. Hanna serves as Project Director and Research Fellow for the Social Science Research Center (SSRC), where she has worked for over eight years. She is currently writing grants and directing research projects for SSRC Director, Dr. Arthur Cosby. Presently, she is Principal Investigator for the HealthWorks! School Health Council Project Evaluation, funded by the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Mississippi Foundation. This project is being carried out by the Tupelo-based HealthWorks! health “edutainment” center and is designed to strengthen school health councils throughout the state.
Ms. Hanna has recently been Principal Investigator for the Delta Oral Health Project Evaluation, funded by the Health Resources and Services Administration. The Delta Oral Health Project was carried out in conjunction with the Mississippi State Department of Health and increased the use of evidence-based oral health services by providing dental screenings and fluoride varnish to children attending licensed child care centers in six Mississippi Delta counties.
The Creating Access through Mississippi Delta Health System Improvements Project was also funded by the Health Resources and Services Administration and analyzed a wide range of health system inputs and outcomes. Ms. Hanna served as the Project Director, coordinating the efforts of researchers from the SSRC, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Law School and University of Tennessee, among others.
Ms. Hanna has also worked with the Annie E. Casey-funded program, Mississippi KIDS COUNT, which provides data, statistics and original research about the health, education, safety and well-being of Mississippi’s children. For this program, she has served as Technical Writer and Editor for the annual MS KIDS COUNT Data Book and the MS KIDS COUNT Video, as well as Co-Coordinator for the annual MS KIDS COUNT Summit and Producer of the MS KIDS COUNT Success Stories Series.
Ms. Hanna has been Co-Project Leader on a project evaluating the Mississippi Healthy Students Act of 2007. This project is titled Childhood Overweight & Obesity in Mississippi: Measuring the Impacts of Healthy School Legislation and is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation through a contract with the Mississippi Center for Health Policy. She has also served as a team member on the overall evaluation of the Healthworks! program.
Previously, Ms. Hanna served as Co-project Leader for the Mississippi Delta Child Health and Well-being Research Program, which utilized child care centers as venues to study a variety of child health issues, such as obesity, environmental tobacco smoke exposure, and oral health. She was also a Research Associate for the Clean Air Rewarding Environments (CARE) Project, a National Institutes of Health-funded project with the University of Arizona designed to study the feasibility of conducting brief interventions for tobacco cessation with parents of Mississippi Head Start attendees.
In addition, Ms. Hanna was also a Research Associate for the Mississippi Building Research Infrastructure Capacity(MSBRIC) Project and the Network Project. MSBRIC was an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality-funded project designed to explore variables associated with children’s oral health, and the Network Project was designed to measure reported health concerns of childcare directors. She also participated in a Children’s Health Fund/Columbia University project, Life Stories, collecting oral histories from Hurricane Katrina survivors on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and New Orleans.
Prior to her appointment with the FCRU, Ms. Hanna edited and assisted in the writing and construction of the health policy reports for the Mississippi Health Policy Research Center of the SSRC. She worked as a copyeditor on the SSRC book project, About Children: An Authoritative Resource on the State of Childhood Today, which addressed numerous health issues of children and was published by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Ms. Hanna has a master’s degree in sociology from Mississippi State University (MSU) and is currently in the public policy and administration PhD program at MSU. She received her undergraduate training in psychology at the University of Mississippi. Prior to her position at the SSRC, she worked for the MSU Sociology Department. During her time at MSU, she has served as vice president of the Alpha Kappa Delta Sociology Honor Society and received an award for Outstanding Graduate Student as well as a scholarship from the MSU Women’s Club. Ms. Hanna has worked as an eighth-grade teacher and is licensed to teach English, social studies, Computer Discovery, psychology, and library science in Mississippi public schools.
March 6, 2011
SSRC 2011 Annual Report
Click here to download the PDF version. Click here for the interactive online version.
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