Catherine L Striley, PhD, MSW, MPE

Catherine Woodstock Striley, PhD, MSW, ACSW, MPE, conducts community-engaged research that aims to increase health equity among community members by going where people are, building relationships, being trustworthy and building partnerships. As Deputy Director of UF’s HealthStreet community engagement program, and in partnership with many community organizations and groups, Dr. Striley studies both the health conditions and concerns of people in the community and tests the effectiveness of community health worker (CHW) interventions to reduce barriers to care through providing screenings, linkages to care, services and research, and to provide prevention services health education and disease management. Dr. Striley is currently funded for HealthStreet’s Expanding Research and Recruitment by Engaging Adults through Community Health Workers (eREACH) research project with Benten Technologies (Phase 1, SBIR), to support Community Health Workers (CHWs) in the process of screening and referral to health services through microlearning education for minority older adult community members, a virtual agent named “Reggie”, and text messaging of appointment reminders. She is a coinvestigator on $8+ million dollars of CDC- and NIH- funded research (L.B. Cottler, PI for all), all of which involve community-engagement. She also serves as the evaluator for Translational Workforce Development of the UF/FSU Clinical and Translational Science Institute. Dr. Striley is also the Co-Chair of the Community Coalition for Older Adults in North Central Florida. She is the Director of the Psychiatric Epidemiology Program in the Department of Epidemiology where she is an Associate Professor and the Master of Epidemiology Program. Dr. Striley serves as a Faculty Senator, is on the Senate Steering Committee and Budget Council for the University. She teaches Psychiatric Epidemiology and Ethics in Population Health (College of Public Health and Health Professions) and Population Health (College of Medicine), as well as mentoring undergraduate, pre- and post-doctoral students/trainees. She received a Master of Social Work in 1989 and a Doctorate of Philosophy in Social Work from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis in 2002, where she was a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) predoctoral fellow. The National Institute on Drug Addiction (R03) funded her dissertation research. She completed the Master of Science in Epidemiology at Washington University School of Medicine in 2004 and completed a three-year postdoctoral fellowship in Epidemiology and Biostatistics funded by NIMH in the Department of Psychiatry in 2005. She was a faculty member in that department from 2005 to June of 2011.

Dr. Striley was a licensed clinical social worker and supervisor for a decade in the St. Louis area.

As a psychiatric epidemiologist, Dr. Striley conducts community-engaged research that aims to increase community members’ recognition of need for health screening, mental health and behavioral health services and to decrease barriers to those services. She has extensive training and experience in community engaged research, including recruitment and retention of diverse community members, and in drug use, abuse and misuse epidemiology. Dr. Striley is one of the few researchers who conducts research in caffeine and energy drink misuse. She is also researching the epidemiology of movement disorders including Tourette Disorder, Dystonia and Essential Tremor.