
Biography
Allison Barlow, PhD, MPH joined the Johns Hopkins Center for American Indian Health in 1991. In April, 2016, she was named Director of the Center. She also directs all behavioral and mental health promotion for the Center. Her health research and program portfolio focuses on child, adolescent and family health and youth development for reservation-based American Indian communities. Projects to date have spanned teen parenting outreach and early child development; suicide, depression and substance abuse prevention; diabetes and obesity prevention; and youth entrepreneurship and life skills training. All programs center on training and employing indigenous outreach workers who design, direct and evaluate the interventions for their tribal communities. She also co-founded the NativeVision program in 1997 with the NFL Players Association to promote Native American youth development through the mobilization of professional athletes to participate in camps and afterschool activities promoting education and healthy lifestyles. She also played a key role in the development of the Johns Hopkins public health certificate in American Indian Health for Native scholars and allied health professionals.
Dr. Barlow’s education includes a PhD from University of Amsterdam (2013); an MPH from Johns Hopkins (1997), an MA pursued through a Rotary International Graduate Scholarship Award from the University of Melbourne, Australia, focused in Aboriginal studies (1990), and a BA from Dartmouth College (1986). She has received the Martin Luther King Community Service/Social Justice Awards from Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions (2007) and Dartmouth College (2008), and the Indian Health Service Director’s Award in 2013.
Associated
Locations
Selected
Publications
- Development of The Elders’ Resilience Curriculum, an Upstream Suicide Prevention Approach
- Testing the efficacy of a brief sexual risk reduction intervention among high-risk AI adults
- Informing precision home-visiting: Identifying families who benefit most from Family Spirit.
- Utilizing partnerships to design a precision approach to implementing evidence-based home visiting
- Precision Family Spirit – A home visiting approach with Native American families in Michigan
- A community participatory process for adapting Family Spirit for other communities
- Youth’s perspective on traditional food revitalization program Feast for the Future
- An Intervention to Promote Healthy Food Access in American Indian Communities
- Addressing Substance-Use Problems in Tribal Home Visiting
- One year results of home-based diabetes prevention and management program for American Indian youth
- Addressing the burden of diabetes among American Indian youth
- Self-Administered Sample Collection for Screening of Sexually Transmitted Diseases
- Respecting the Circle of life: One Year Outcomes from a Randomized Controlled Comparison
- The Respecting the Circle of Life Trial
- Entrepreneurship Education: A Strengths-Based Approach
- Understanding the Relationship Between Substance Use and Self-Injury in Native American Youth
- Emergency department utilization among American Indian adolescents
- Non-suicidal Self-Injury in an American Indian reservation community
- Toward Understanding Youth Suicide
- Teenage mothers visited by paraprofessionals had greater involvement with and knowledge of childcare