Mentor Moments

Sabrina Kurtz-Rossi, M.Ed., is Assistant Professor of Public Health and Community Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine where she teaches health literacy to health professionals in training, trains health professionals in practice, and is committed to improving the health literacy of individuals, families and communities. She is Senior Research Specialist for the Center for Health Literacy Research + Practice at Tufts Medicine where she is working to integrate applied health literacy and plain language throughout the clinical research life cycle. Her areas of study and practice include the application of adult learning theory in public health promotion and plain language principles applied to key information on informed consent forms.

Professor Tin Tin Su is a public health physician and researcher with over 20 years of working experience. She is a director of the South East Asia Community Observatory (SEACO) Health & Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS) under Monash University Malaysia. Professor Su is one of the founding members of the Asia Health Literacy Association (AHLA) and was elected vice president of 2014–2016. She obtained the Yufong International Health Literacy Award (2017) and Health Literacy Leadership Award (2018). Professor Su is an executive board member of the International Health Literacy Association (IHLA) and director of the Asian region until 2022. She integrated the concept of health literacy into population-based research and climate and health interventions in HDSS.

She led the turning point of SEACO’s research excellence in “Climate change and health”. She established climate change and health impact monitoring through the eHealth at SEACO(CHIMES) project. She was also involved in a global initiative to incorporate the Climate Change and Health Evaluation and Response System (CHEERS) in the routine HDSSs.

Professor Su’s project on health literacy-informed behavioral and structural climate change adaptation intervention is funded by the Wellcome Trust. She will become an inaugural Director of Monash University’s soon-to-be-established “Regional Hub for Asia Climate Change and Health”. The thematic priority areas of the hub include a climate-literate health workforce in the region.

Leena Paakkari is an Associate Professor at the University of Jyväskylä, Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences. She has 20 years of experience in health education teacher training and has been developing health literacy framework for the national health education school curriculum. Currently, she leads national Health Behaviour in School-aged Children Study -research group in Finland, and is part of research project ‘Critical’ which aims to develop technological and societal innovations to support adolescents’ critical reading skills. Furthermore, her research has focused on advancing an understanding on disparities in adolescents’ health literacy in Europe. Paakkari has collaborated with several institutions such as WHO, UNESCO and Council of Europe.

Stephan is professor of Health Psychology at the UC Louvain, Belgium. His research expertise includes health promotion, public health psychology, health literacy, patient education, accident prevention, and public health capacity building. He has supervised a broad range of national and international research projects, over 20 PhD projects, and more than a hundred master thesis studies, authored over 150 scientific publications, and taught students and health professionals in Europe, North and Latin America, Africa and Asia. Prof. Van den Broucke has served as an evaluator for research projects submitted to the European Commission and to research foundations in Belgium, Croatia, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Portugal, Switzerland and Québec, Canada; he participated in accreditation committees for training programs in the Netherlands, Switzerland and Denmark, and gave policy advice to authoritative bodies on public health in Belgium, the European Commission, the Sultanate of Oman and the Open Science Foundation. He is an elected Board member of the International Union for Health Promotion and Education (IUHPE); a member of the Technical Advisory Group on Behavioral and Cultural Insights of WHO/Euro, of the Working Group on Social Research Methods and Advice of the European Food Safety Authority, and of the Scientific Advisory Group of the Asian Health Literacy Association. He is also president of the HealthNest consortium for health literacy in Belgium.

Karen Komondor, RN, BSN, CCRN, is a nationally recognized leader and expert in health literacy. As the Founder and President of Health Literacy 360 LLC, she provides training for health professionals and consumers and consultations to organizations on health literacy best practices. Her mission is to reduce communication barriers within the complex healthcare system and ease the burden on patients.

For over 20 years, Karen served as the Director of Organizational Development and the Health Literacy Institute at St. Vincent Charity Medical Center, an urban teaching hospital in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, until its closure in November 2022. Throughout her career, Karen has conducted training sessions and delivered keynote speeches at numerous healthcare facilities and conferences at the local, state, and national levels. She has authored numerous articles and appeared as a guest speaker on radio programs and local TV stations. Additionally, she is a regular guest faculty member on health literacy at multiple universities.

Karen previously chaired Healthy Cleveland’s Health Literacy Committee and is co-founder and past president of Ohio Health Literacy Partners, a statewide non-profit collaborative dedicated to empowering Ohioans to make informed health choices. Most recently, she chairs the National Council to Improve Patient Safety through Health Literacy.

Distinguished Professor, Director of the Centre for Global Health and Equity, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia.

Richard is prolific public health researcher, educator and program implementer. His teams have developed and implemented evidence-based and practical tools and processes to make substantive impacts on health and equity, not only at the project level, but at the state, regional, national, and international levels.

He is Distinguished Professor of Health Sciences and Director, Centre for Global Health and Equity, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. He holds appointments at Santé publique France, University of Copenhagen, and NOVA University Lisbon. His team was recently awarded a prestigious 5-year Australian NHMRC Investigator Grant (L3) to advance health literacy development globally. He is a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher (2018, 2021) top 1% most influential researcher globally, having published over 300 original scientific research papers.

He is an adviser to the World Health Organization (WHO). With global partners, his team created WHO’s 2022 Health Literacy Development for the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases four-volume report. Five years of work with global experts and field workers generated new health literacy concepts and tools for practical implementation by Member States.

Richard attributes his team’s exceptional track record in innovation and subsequent impact of their tools and processes to authentic listening to diverse people with lived experience and the service providers in the field. This is reflected in the wide and repeated use of their tools by over 1000 teams, most notably the Health Literacy Questionnaire (HLQ) used in over 80 countries. Authentic and lasting impact is a key feature of the team’s Ophelia (Optimising Health Literacy and Access) co-design and services redesign process. It is featured in WHO National Health Literacy Development projects (20+ countries), and the EU Commission Joint Action on Cardiovascular Disease and Diabetes (JACARDI) where Ophelia, co-led with Santé publique France, is implemented by government agencies in 13 EU countries across 24 projects.

People close to him find him intensely focused on research quality, integrity and achieving real world outcomes. In recent years his team has focused on making impact on health equity through applying strengths-based, anti-colonial, locally-led methods from ideation to scale-up.

As a law professor and plain-language advocate, Chris Trudeau has dedicated his professional life to making difficult information easy to understand for people from all walks of life. Trudeau’s research focuses on gathering empirical data that helps determine best practices for clearly explaining difficult health and legal topics. Trudeau is an Associate Professor at the University of Detroit Mercy Law School. He is a self-described “health-literacy lawyer,” who is the first lawyer to be appointed to the National Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable of Health Literacy. Trudeau also has extensive experience working with clinical trials regulations. He has served on the FDA’s Risk Communication Advisory Committee and served as the Director of Regulatory Knowledge & Support at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.