Ginnie Sawyer-Morris, Ph.D.

Dr. Sawyer-Morris is an early career research scientist with experience designing, implementing, and evaluating public health interventions addressing health disparities and addiction. Her research interests are health equity-focused and currently center on the design, use, and evaluation of digital health tools (e.g., data dashboards, digital health apps, digital therapeutics) with the aim of improving healthcare access and quality for historically underrepresented populations, specifically individuals with justice involvement and substance use disorder.

Dr. Sawyer-Morris completed her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at the University of Delaware with a specialized focus in advanced quantitative methodology and addiction science. She was a Dr. James A. Ferguson Emerging Infectious Diseases Fellow at Johns Hopkins University, where she explored novel applications of unsupervised, non-linear machine learning models (e.g., autoencoder) in health disparities research. She applied this training in her dissertation research using machine learning to explore gender differences in SUD recovery beyond early stages of treatment. This work was granted the Dan Rich Distinguished Dissertation Award, placing it in the top 2% of dissertation projects completed at the University of Delaware in 2022. Recently, she completed a postdoctoral position at the Addiction Policy Forum where she worked as a core member of an interdisciplinary team that reported to NIH leadership across multiple projects including two affiliated with NIH’s Helping to End Addiction Long-Term (HEAL) Initiative: HEAL Connections and the Justice Community Opioid Innovation Network (JCOIN).