Biography
Amy McQueen, Ph.D. is Professor of Medicine and Director of Graduate Programs in Applied Health Behavior Research (AHBR) at the School of Medicine. She is also Co-Director of the Health Communication Research Lab at the Brown School. She serves on several university committees including Siteman Cancer Center’s PRMC Behavioral Science Subcommittee. Dr. McQueen has a track record in team science as PI and Co-I on numerous grants across both campuses.
Dr. McQueen completed her PhD in Social Psychology at the University of Houston and was awarded an NCI-funded post-doctoral fellowship in cancer prevention and control at the University of Texas-Houston, School of Public Health. Dr. McQueen has applied social psychology and health behavior theory to the development, implementation, and evaluation of behavioral interventions designed to increase individuals’ preventive behaviors such as cancer screening and smoking cessation. She has a particular interest in understanding the causal mechanisms underlying the inter-relations between health behaviors and cognitive, psychosocial, and environmental determinants. Her specific training and expertise in psychometrics and structural equation modeling supports her research interests in measurement development and evaluation, and examining complex mediating and moderating pathways of influence involving psychological factors, health behaviors, and health outcomes. She teaches a Survey Methods course each Fall for AHBR that helps students learn to evaluate the reliability and validity of survey measures and procedures, and propose their own measurement development and validation for a latent construct of interest. Other research interest areas include health disparities, risk perceptions, health communication including the use of narratives, patient-physician communication, qualitative research methods and analysis, and usability testing/user-centered design.