Evaluator
Third Party Evaluator
At its core, Prevent 2 Protect is a community-based cross-system intervention. While our project’s primary aim is to provide services to our community through assessment, consultation, and intensive support, we are passionate about cultivating a community of practice focused on preventing targeted violence and ensuring safer communities. By identifying best practices and developing tools and processes, we are able to provide a model of intervention to reduce adolescent targeted violence.
The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health will provide a third-party evaluation of Prevent 2 Protect over the five-year pilot period and work closely with the Hub team to develop evaluation metrics and report on the Project’s accomplishments. The Harvard evaluation will assess outcomes, inform potential statewide implementation, and contribute to the body of knowledge regarding school violence prevention.
Lead Evaluator
Dr. Testa is a Senior Lecturer in Biostatistics. As an experienced public health practitioner, health outcomes researcher, evaluator, biostatistician, and the current Co-Director of the Harvard T.H. Chan EPREP program, for the past 30 years Dr. Testa has worked closely with federal, state, county, regional and local public health, community and government authorities. She previously served as the Head of the Evaluation Core for the CDC-sponsored, Harvard Academic Center for Public Health Preparedness, and as a Co-Investigator within the Harvard Preparedness and Emergency Response Research Center (PERRC) leading several national committees in bioterrorism, disaster planning and operations. She also was the Principal Investigator and Director of the Harvard Chan Preparedness and Emergency Response Learning Center (PERLC) between 2010 and 2016 working on the development of competency-based instructional development and evaluation and leading several national committees focused on public health and emergency preparedness curriculum development, training and tools. She has been the Director of the Harvard MPH Program in Quantitative Methods for nearly 30 years, mentoring over 1,200 student research projects. She is currently President of the Massachusetts Association of Health Boards working with 351 BOHs and 329 health departments.
Evaluator
Dr. Stern is a research professor at Boston University and a senior fellow at both the Center for Naval Analyses and the Community Safety Branch at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Stern has taught courses on counter-terrorism for over 20 years – at Boston University, Harvard, and CIA University. She is a Member of the Homeland Security Experts Group. She has been a PI or Co-PI on NSF, Hariri Institute of Computing, and NIJ-funded countering-violent extremism projects, and a member of research teams funded by DHS and NATO. Stern is the coauthor with J.M. Berger of ISIS: The State of Terror; and the author of My War Criminal: Personal Encounters with an Architect of Genocide, Denial: A Memoir of Terror, Terror in the Name of God and The Ultimate Terrorists. Stern served on President Clinton’s National Security Council Staff in 1994-95. She was included among seven “thinkers” in Time Magazine’s 2001 series profiling 100 innovators. She was selected as a Guggenheim Fellow in 2009, a World Economic Forum Fellow from 2002-2004, an International Affairs Fellow in 1994, and elected to Sigma Xi, an engineering honors society, in 1986. Stern advises a number of government agencies on issues related to terrorism. She has a bachelor’s degree from Barnard College in chemistry, a master’s degree from MIT in technology policy (chemical engineering), and a doctorate from Harvard University in public policy. She is a 2016 graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis.