Leadership

Co-Directors/Mentors
Jacinda Nicklas, MD, MPH, MA is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the Director of the SCORE Fellowship. She received her MD from Harvard Medical School and completed her residency in internal medicine and primary care at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. She received her MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health and completed her clinical research fellowship in Integrative Medicine and General Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Nicklas completed the NIH-funded Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH) K12 award and completed a K23 career development award funded by the NIH National Heart Lung and Blood Institute. Her current research focuses on clinical trials of weight loss medications, the impact of GLP-1RAs on brain remodeling, a multifaceted intervention during the menopause transition, and testing an imaging-led intervention to prevent and treat cardiovascular disease. She is board-certified in both Internal Medicine and Obesity Medicine. Dr. Nicklas sees patients in primary care as well as in the CU Medicine Weight Management and Wellness Clinic, where she specializes in weight control throughout the reproductive cycle, including pre-conception, during pregnancy, postpartum, and through menopause. She started a postpartum transition clinic at the University of Colorado to treat patients who had high-risk pregnancies and to help them prevent future cardiometabolic disease. She is the mother of three kids, ages 16, 19, and 21.
Mandy A. Allison, MAEd, MD, MSPH is a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. She is a pediatrician and health services researcher with 16 years of mentorship experience with medical students, residents, research fellows, and early career faculty as well as research services professionals. She was a Co-Director for the Primary Care Research Fellowship at ACCORDS from 2012 through 2019 and has conducted T3/T4 research since 2004 as a co-investigator or principal investigator on 23 grants funded by foundations, the CDC, AHRQ, and NIH. In December 2023 she became the Director of the Prevention Research Center (PRC; Prevention Research Center for Family & Child Health). The PRC team conducts rigorous, mixed-methods research with a focus on intervention early in the life cycle to inform policy and practice for promoting the health of children, families, and their communities. As PRC Co-Director and Director, her research as Principal Investigator includes a National Institute of Nursing Research-funded R01 to investigate the effectiveness of nurse home-visiting for women with previous live births and a National Heart Lung Blood Institute-funded cooperative agreement (UG3/UH3) to investigate the effectiveness of home-visiting to promote maternal and child cardiovascular health. Her additional research with the PRC as a PI or co-investigator includes: a mixed-methods formative study of Nurse Family Partnership (NFP) for women with previous live births, a qualitative study of health care experiences of mothers with a history of substance use disorder, a mixed methods study about collaboration and system integration of NFP with other community providers in achieving positive maternal-child health outcomes, and a quasi-experimental study of the effectiveness of NFP for multiparous women using health plan data. She has experience leading multi-disciplinary study teams, working with community partners, designing pragmatic trials, and conducting mixed-methods research.
Matthew F. Daley, MD is a Senior Clinician Investigator at the Institute for Health Research. He conducts research on a broad range of pediatric-oriented topics. He is focused particularly on vaccine-related topics, including vaccine safety, parental vaccine hesitancy, and immunization services delivery. For many years, he has also worked to expand the use of multi-institutional electronic health record data for public health surveillance and research purposes. Dr. Daley received his medical training at Stanford University School of Medicine and completed a residency and chief residency in Pediatrics at the University of Colorado. Additionally, Dr. Daley is a practicing pediatrician at Kaiser Permanente Colorado, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
Anna Maw, MD, MS is an adult hospitalist, clinical informaticist, implementation scientist, and Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hospital Medicine at the University of Colorado. Her research sits at the intersection of implementation science, AI, and health equity: she uses implementation science methods to implement and evaluate AI interventions and uses AI to advance implementation science methods. She is a faculty member in the Dissemination and Implementation Science Core at ACCORDS and the Dissemination and Implementation Science Certificate Program.
Sean O’Leary, MD, MPH is a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist, an investigator at ACCORDS (Adult and Child Center for Outcomes Research and Delivery Science), and the Director of the Colorado Children’s Outcomes Network (COCONet), Colorado’s pediatric practice-based research network. After completing medical school at the University of Texas in Houston, Dr. O’Leary did his pediatric residency in Denver at Children’s Hospital/University of Colorado. Following residency, Dr. O’Leary was a partner in a large pediatric practice in Fort Collins, Colorado for 8 years. He then returned to Denver to pursue an infectious diseases fellowship as well as a Primary Care Research Fellowship. Dr. O’Leary’s research focuses on prevention of vaccine-preventable diseases (VPDs) through understanding clinical, attitudinal and infrastructural barriers to vaccination, and developing and testing interventions to address those barriers.
Darcy Thompson, MD, MPH is a Professor of Pediatrics in the Section of Nutrition at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. She is also the Clinical Research Director for the Colorado Child Health Research Institute (CCHRI). Clinically, she works in the Lifestyle Medicine Program at Children's Hospital Colorado. Dr. Thompson's research focuses on early childhood obesity. Current and past work applies the social ecological model to understand lifestyle-related behaviors in Latino families with young children with the goal of informing the development of culturally and contextually relevant interventions. She has served as principal investigator or co-investigator on studies funded by the National Institutes of Health (NHLBI, NINR, and NICHD), the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). She has experience with mixed-methods research, conducting research with individuals who prefer a language other than English, and community-based participatory research methods, having integrated community stakeholders into both the development of research proposals and the implementation of research projects. She has mentored students, residents, fellows, and junior faculty in the design and conduct of health outcomes research, health services research, and health disparities research.

Additional APCRF Faculty & Staff
Kathryn Colborn, PhD MSPH is an Associate Professor the Division of Healthcare Policy and Research in the Department of Medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. She also holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Biostatistics and Informatics in the Colorado School of Public Health and serves as Core Lead for the Biostatistics and Analytics Core of the Adult and Child Center for Outcomes Research and Delivery Science (ACCORDS). In this role, she leads a team of faculty biostatisticians and 13 MS data analysts. For the past 6 years, she has also led the Data Informatics and Statistics Core (DISC) of the Palliative Care Research Cooperative Group (PCRC), a U2C funded by the NINR. In her role as DISC lead, she has mentored faculty from institutions across the US during the Clinical Trial Intensive Programs, has assisted with clinical trials in palliative care, and has led two data coordinating centers for multi-site randomized trials. Her own research focuses on development and validation of statistical methodologies for clinical prediction models, reducing infections, and health services research. She also leads research in improving statistical methodologies for cluster randomized trials. Dr. Colborn has over 100 peer-reviewed publications and has mentored 18 graduate students, 7 surgical research residents, one palliative care T-32 fellow, and 4 faculty career development awardees.
Ashley Dafoe, MA received her MA in Applied Anthropology from Mississippi State University. She joined the Qualitative and Mixed Methods Core as a Qualitative Analyst in 2020 and has been working with SCORE fellows since March of 2022. During her time at ACCORDS, she has worked on a variety of projects across various topic areas including palliative care, addiction medicine, pediatrics, shared decision making, mHealth, and more. Her research interests include health inequity, social determinants of health, and implementation science.
Brooke Dorsey, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine. She specializes as a Qualitative & Mixed Methodologist. She has expertise in the use of specific qualitative methodologies, including phenomenological, historical, and narrative approaches, among others, and she is skilled in health policy and program evaluation. Dr. Dorsey Holliman has expertise in community-based participatory research (CBPR), engaging with communities to co-create knowledge that promotes health solutions to target better health for all people. Dr. Dorsey Holliman’s research focuses on maternal health outcomes and representativeness of health benefits – she seeks to explore the determinants of health disparities. Dr. Dorsey Holliman earned her B.A. in Psychology from North Carolina Central University, an M.A. in Forensic Psychology from the University of Denver, and a Ph.D. in Health and Behavioral Sciences from the University of Colorado Denver.
Claire Groves, PhD joined ACCORDS as a Quantitative Analyst in 2026. She received her master's degree in Psychological Sciences from Northern Arizona University in 2022 and her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from The University of Texas at San Antonio in 2025. Her research has focused on physical activity behaviors, mental health, and physical health outcomes, with expertise in structural equation modeling, latent variable modeling, longitudinal data analysis, and other advanced statistical techniques. Her interests include applying quantitative methods to support clinical and public health research.
Nico Punkar, MPA joined ACCORDS in 2025 as a Qualitative Analyst on the Qualitative and Mixed Methods Core and the Learning Health System Core. He received his MPA from CU Denver, where he is currently earning his PhD in Public Affairs. Nico's background has given him expertise in pragmatic evaluation and organizational learning with an emphasis on public values and data-based decision-making. During his time at ACCORDS, Nico has contributed to projects examining implementation of technology in healthcare settings, vaccination uptake strategies, and clinical decision-making. Nico’s research interests include gender equity, participatory methodology, and the interplay between policy and organizational practices.
Sharon Scarbro, MS joined ACCORDS as a Data Analyst in 2016. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics from Colorado College and a Master of Science in Biometrics from the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. She has over 30 years’ experience working with both researchers and community members in a variety of areas such as cystic fibrosis testing, transgender health and evaluating school-based nutrition and physical activity programs.
Elena Shergina, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Healthcare Policy and Research in the Department of Medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz and a biostatistician in the Data Informatics & Statistics Core (DISC) of ACCORDS. She received her PhD in Biostatistics in 2024 from the University of Kansas Medical Center. Elena has collaborated on a range of clinical and observational studies with researchers specializing in public health, emergency, and geriatric medicine. Elena served as a statistical expert at all stages of scientific studies including design, implementation, analysis, interpretation, and reporting. Her research interests include developing and implementing novel clinical trial designs that incorporate Bayesian methodology.
Rebecca Speer, MA is the Research Training Program Manager at ACCORDS for the SCORE Fellowship and the ACCORDS Primary Care Research Fellowship. She has worked for the last sixteen years managing research projects and programs, and for the last nine years has been responsible for all day-to-day operations for each of the ACCORDS fellowship programs, including the K12 Dissemination and Implementation Research Training Program that ended in June of 2022. Ms. Speer is a graduate of the University of Colorado, Boulder where she received two bachelor’s degrees in Spanish Language and Literature and in Communication. She then attended the University of California, Santa Barbara where she completed a master’s degree in Communication (social science paradigm) in 2010. Prior to joining ACCORDS in 2017, she worked as the Research Project Coordinator on a multi-arm, bilingual, pragmatic obesity trial in primary care at Denver Health Medical Center. Outside of work, she enjoys traveling, scuba diving, reading, snow skiing, roller skating, and photography.