The TL1 program is co-directed by Douglas Leslie, PhD at the Hershey campus and Jim Pawelczyk, PhD at the University Park Campus.
Dr. Leslie is a Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences in the College of Medicine at Hershey. Dr. Leslie is a health economist with considerable experience in the fields of health economics, health services research and pharmacoeconomics. His areas of study have included the effects of managed care and other fiscal pressures on patterns of service use and costs for the mentally ill, the quality of mental health care, adherence to treatment guidelines for individuals with schizophrenia, the cost-effectiveness of antipsychotic medications, and health care service use and costs associated with autism. Dr. Leslie has worked extensively with large administrative claims databases, including those from Medicaid, the Department of Veterans Affairs and private health insurers.
Dr. Pawelczyk is an Associate Professor in the Department of Kinesiology in the College of Health and Human Development at UP. He holds additional appointments in the COM and the Interdepartmental Graduate Program in Physiology. He has been a member of the CRC Advisory Committee for 7 years and co-directed the cross-campus T32 “Physiological Adaptations to Stress” where he and Dr. Lang developed “distributed-learning” models for multi-campus life sciences education. Dr. Pawelczyk is a former astronaut and served as a payload specialist on the only space mission dedicated to basic and clinical neuroscience (Neurolab, STS-90). He has conducted clinical research for more than 25 years, directly mentoring medical, graduate and undergraduate students. In addition to research and teaching responsibilities, he is a former Faculty Master of the Schreyer Honors College. With funding from NASA, his laboratory focuses on autonomic regulation of blood pressure and blood flow, particularly hypovolemic states and extreme environmental conditions.
