Faculty/Staff

Professor

Email:

Phone: (818) 677-2997

Office location: JD 3537

Biography

Dr. Sloane Burke holds a Ph.D. in Health Studies from Texas Woman’s University, is a Certified Health Education Specialist, and is a Public Health Fellow from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  She is also an active member of the American Public Health Association (APHA) serving on Governing Council and with the Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE). Dr. Burke has over 14 years of teaching experience in higher education and 10 years experience in the health-based nonprofit field. She has worked with agencies such as the Susan G. Komen for the Cure, American Cancer Society, and the American Red Cross. Dr. Burke has published professional journal articles on women’s health, health disparities, and instructional technology, and was a contributing author for a published book and booklet series on breast cancer. Dr. Burke’s research interests include Latina health, college health, and breast cancer. An award winning professor and CSUN alumni, Dr. Burke teaches both undergraduate and graduate MPH courses in health communications, curriculum design, and program planning for public health.  Her teaching experience also includes research methods, health disparities, global health, and study abroad.

Professor, Director of Health Administration Program

Email:

Phone: (818) 677-7257

Office location:JD 2532

Biography

Louis Rubino, Ph.D., FACHE, is Professor and Director of the Health Administration program at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). In the community, he serves as a governing board member at St. Francis Medical Center and is Chair of their Quality and Patient Safety Subcommittee. Prior to go into academia, Dr. Rubino had a twenty year management career as a hospital administrator and health system executive. His last position was as Vice President of Paracelsus Healthcare, a public hospital management company based in Houston, Texas. Dr. Rubino was in charge of the operations of their California facilities (eleven acute care, four skilled nursing). Concurrently, he taught part time at the following schools: UCLA, USC, Cal State University, Northridge and Cal State University, Los Angeles. Dr. Rubino received a Bachelor of Science degree in biological sciences from the University of Southern California in 1976, a Master of Science in Healthcare Management at California State University, Los Angeles, in 1979, a Master of Public Administration in 1985 and a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in 1990. His expertise is the operations of acute hospitals particularly their leadership and governance and international health care reform particularly China’s health care system. He holds four visiting professorships in the People’s Republic of China. He is a recertified Fellow in the American College of Healthcare Executives. 

Assistant Professor

Email:

Phone: (818) 677-7052

Office location: JD 3535

Biography

Dr. Merav Efrat  is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Sciences at Cal State University Northridge.  She obtained her Doctorate in Education from the University of Southern California, Master in Public Health from California State University, Northridge and Bachelors in Psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz.  She has over ten years of professional work experience as a Health Educator and International Board Certified Lactation Consultant. She has worked in organizations including Kaiser Permanente and Providence Health Systems.  Her research focuses on developing and evaluating interventions that reduce childhood obesity, particularly among disadvantaged communities.  Specifically, in an attempt to reduce the prevalence of childhood obesity, she is interested in examining the efficacy of interventions that can be used to promote physical activity among elementary school-age children, as well as to promote six months exclusive breastfeeding rates.  She currently serves as the Project Director of a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant aimed at advancing professional competencies of graduate nutrition students in the area of lactation education.  Among other things, this project enables her to develop opportunities for CSUN students to promote breastfeeding in the community.

Associate Professor

Email:

Phone: (818) 677-6704

Office location: RE 259

Biography

Rosa M. Angulo Barroso obtained her BS at the University of Barcelona (Spain). She holds a MS in biomechanics and a dual PhD in kinesiology and neural sciences from Indiana University.

Her developmental Kinesiologist and neuroscientist backgrounds allow her to blend sensorimotor behavior with underlying neuroscience principles. She specializes in the motor behavior of infant and children populations, both with and without developmental problems. Her research focuses on the effects of physical rehabilitation interventions on gait, mobility, physical activity levels, and quality of life in pediatric populations. Most recently, she is interested in the relationship between physical activity and learning in children. Thus far her research has made contributions to describe and enhance levels of physical activity in pediatric populations, and to implement early treadmill training interventions in pre-locomotor infants to improve adaptive gait. Part of her research focuses on adverse effect of iron deficiency on children’s development collaborating in research projects in Costa Rica, Chile, USA, and China. She has been able to contribute to the field of iron deficiency with new knowledge about the motor development, reaching skills, activity levels of infants and children with current or former iron deficiency. Thanks to the research environment provided by these projects, she has been able to conduct cross cultural and cross disciplinary studies. In addition, she has been able to develop ways to assess infant neurocognitive function with eye tracking and movement-emotion connections using specially designed equipment and paradigms.

She has had academic appointments at the University of Michigan and the University of Barcelona. Currently, she is an associate professor in California State University, Northridge, where she teaches motor learning and motor control.

Juana Mora was born in Jalisco, Mexico and immigrated to the U.S. with her parents and seven siblings in 1960.  Juana is the first member of her family to attend college. She worked after school to help her family and received financial support to attend the University of California at Santa Cruz where she completed her B.A. in Linguistics.  She later received a Ford Foundation Fellowship to attend Stanford University where she received her Ph.D. in Education.                           

Dr. Mora is recognized as a national expert on Latina/o culturally focused substance abuse treatment and prevention and has developed and taught courses on Latino families and women.   She is a professor in the Department of Chicana/o Studies at California State University, Northridge where she has taught for twenty-three years.  Dr. Mora’s most recent research focused on the development of community based research partnerships for the improvement of Latino community health.  She has co-edited a book titled, Latino Social Policy:  A Participatory Research Model, which highlights lessons learned and best practices in Chicano community based health research.  She has published extensively on these topics and served as principal investigator and evaluator on major federal SAMHSA funded grants (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration). 

Dr. Mora currently serves as the Assistant to the Provost on HSI and Diversity Initiatives and will soon begin to administer a five year, 3.2 M grant funded by the Department of Education to increase the number of Latino and low-income transfer students to CSUN.

Dr. Kenneth V. Luna holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures with specialization in Linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles. At CSUN, he is the Director of the Barbara Ann Ward Language Center, an Academic Technology Fellow, the Quality Assurance Faculty Lead for Online and Blended Courses, and the campus mentor for the Clinton Global Initiative University. His research focuses on the phonetics, phonology, and intonation of Spanish and has published various articles about the Spanish of Puerto Rico. His research interests also include dialectology, Caribbean linguistics, Romance linguistics, historical linguistics, and linguistic typology, as well as the use of technology in the letters and sciences. Dr. Luna teaches Hispanic and formal linguistics at both the undergraduate and graduate levels in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures, and the Department of Linguistics/TESL, where he offers courses in phonetics, phonology, acoustics, language and culture, dialectology, Romance linguistics, and historical linguistics. Before his career in linguistics, Dr. Luna studied Industrial Microbiology at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, and later, Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics at UCLA. He is also a professional in the fields of subtitling and closed captioning, and a translator.

Adrianna is a Senior Consultant in Clinical Transformation at Cedars-Sinai Health System where she supports the development and implementation of best practices for patient engagement, clinical efficiency and appropriateness of care. Prior to joining Cedars-Sinai, Adrianna was at Mattel Children’s Hospital and the Children’s Discovery Institute at UCLA. In this role, she’s managed HRSA and CMMI-funded projects to develop and implement innovative interventions using the expert panel process and the RAND/UCLA Appropriateness Method (RAM) to reduce resource utilization in children with medical complexity (CMC). Adrianna has also worked in research and evaluation and national proposal development at Kaiser Permanente Southern California and Health Net, Inc.

A native of Texas, Adrianna transferred to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she obtained her BA in Sociology. Her personal passion in health disparities led her to complete a biostatistics internship at the Harvard School of Public Health and an MPH from California State University, Northridge. Adrianna has co-authored several papers, including one of the first to examine caregiver perspectives on preventable hospitalizations in CMC.

Cathy Kitinoja holds a BA in Sociology from CSU, Northridge.  It seems that every job that Cathy has ever had has prepared her for being Grant Coordinator of CAMINO!  She also works in the HSCI department as an Administration Support Assistant.