AP-NORC Center Experts

David Cotton is a vice president of Public Health Research and Evaluation in the Public Health Department at NORC. Cotton brings 30 years of experience leading organizations that provide evaluation, research, training, and technical assistance to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institute of Health (NIH), the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), and other US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) agencies, foundations, and academic partners. At NORC, he works with partners across health departments to foster continued excellence in program evaluation and prevention projects.

Prior to his work at NORC, Cotton was the senior vice president responsible for the public health, health sciences, behavioral health, and survey research at ICF. He led an extensive portfolio of work for federal, foundation, and university clients, which included development of large national surveys, longitudinal multisite evaluations, and large-scale evaluation and policy technical assistance programs supporting national grant programs.

During his time at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) prior to joining ICF (then Macro International), the focus of his work was in the application of behavioral and social science to HIV prevention efforts. These activities included the development and evaluation of multiple, integrated intervention strategies using both community-level and facility-based approaches.

Cotton has co-authored 19 journal articles and presented more than 50 papers at national and international conferences. His peer-reviewed work has appeared in Public Health Reports, The Annual Review of Public Health, AIDS, New Directions for Evaluation, among others. Cotton is a founding member of the Atlanta-Area Evaluation Association.

Kari L. Carris provides methodological expertise and managerial leadership to over 70 professional staff while also assisting with the development and oversight of NORC’s Health Sciences research portfolio. In addition to her administrative responsibilities, she develops and directs complex data collection and analysis projects for various federal agencies, foundations, and academic institutions. Carris also has served as a member of NORC’s Institutional Review Board.

Carris has more than a decade of experience leading multidisciplinary teams in the design, development, and delivery of complex survey data and analytic products used by policy makers and researchers in the public health, criminal justice, and mental health arenas. Her expertise spans a range of data collection methodologies and modes, having directed large- and small-scale telephone, in-person, web, and self-administered survey projects. From 2008-2012, she led NORC’s innovative address-based sampling, multimode data collection effort for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health across the U.S. (REACH U.S.) Risk Factor Survey. Under her direction, NORC completed more than 25,000 interviews annually via telephone, mail, or in-person data collection protocols with adults from various racial and ethnic groups across the country to monitor progress and achievements of community-based interventions designed to eliminate health disparities.

Carris served as the Associate Project Director for the National Immunization Survey (NIS) from 2013-2014. Sponsored by CDC’s National Center for Infectious and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD) and the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), the NIS is an extensive landline/cell phone RDD survey that is designed to collect immunization data about young children and teenagers. She directed methodological research projects for the NIS to improve response rates, address informational needs related to childhood vaccination rates, and investigate the feasibility of emerging sampling and data collection approaches.

Roy Ahn, MPH, ScD, is a Principal Research Scientist in the Health Care Department at NORC. An experienced public health specialist, he has worked for 20 years at the intersection of program leadership and research in the areas of health policy, nonprofit/civil society organization management and strategy, and public health innovation. Prior to NORC, he served as the founding Associate Director of the Division of Global Health and Human Rights in the Massachusetts General Hospital’s Department of Emergency Medicine, where he designed, implemented, and evaluated health programs in nearly a dozen countries (e.g., South Sudan, Kenya, Zambia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, the U.S.). Funders of this work included USAID, UK Aid, Humanity United, and others.

Ahn also served as a full-time faculty member at Harvard Medical School between 2009 and 2015, most recently as Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine. Additionally, for three years, he co-led a Harvard University course in Kenya called Innovating for Health Transformation in Africa. He holds deep expertise in the field of human rights and health, having served as a planning meeting member of the Institute of Medicine’s Multi-Sectoral Group on Child Exploitation in Tourism; the Administration for Children and Families’ (ACF’s) Office on Trafficking in Persons SOAR National Technical Working Group; and the UK government-funded Humanitarian Innovation Fund Global Advisory Board on Gender-Based Violence. He previously served as a Research Fellow at the university-wide Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard, where he authored teaching cases and teaching notes on nonprofit management and strategy, global civil society organization accountability and legitimacy, and private foundation governance.

Earlier in his career, Ahn worked on federal government-funded task order contracts as well as grants on a range of public health topics at Research Triangle Institute and the Lewin Group. He also worked for the CDC’s Business Responds to AIDS/Labor Responds to AIDS (BRTA/LRTA) program, a public/private partnership designed to increase business and labor participation in the development of workplace HIV/AIDS policies and programs. Versed in qualitative as well as mixed-methods research, he is widely published in journals, such as Health Affairs, JAMA Pediatrics, Pediatrics, BJOG, BMJ Open, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics. He is also editorial board member of the Essential Clinical Global Health textbook (Wiley-Blackwell) as well as lead co-editor of the Innovating for Healthy Urbanization textbook (Springer).