Regina Shih

Regina Shih's main research areas are mental health, youth development, aging, dementia, and caregiving. Her skills include policy analysis, multi-level analysis of large datasets, study design, strategic planning, and program evaluation. Her research interests are varied and center community-engaged approaches and policy-relevant outcomes. With her collaborators, she evaluated the associations between alcohol and cannabis outlet density and youth substance use, developed medication reconciliation measures for post-acute care settings across the US under the Improving Medicare Post-Acute Care Transformation Act, created a national database of neighborhood measures to examine contextual influences on dementia risk, outlined policy recommendations for improving sleep in the U.S. military; published a policy blueprint for dementia long-term services and supports that resulted in Congressional testimony; tested a multi-site RCT to prevent substance use in middle schools; developed a toolkit for local public health and aging departments to prepare older adults for climate change-related events, and conducted a risk assessment of environmental health risks for the U.A.E.’s environmental health action plan. She is grateful to the sponsors that have funded her work, including private foundations such as John A. Hartford Foundation and California Health Care Foundation; local governments; and federal agencies such as CDC, NIA, NIMHD, NIAAA, NHLBI, NIOSH, and the Department of Defense.