Doreen Branch, MS, Social Psychology
Senior Program Manager
Chapel Hill Center
Chapel Hill, N. Carolina

Phone: (775) 684-4074
Fax: (775) 684-4185
Email: branch@pire.org


Ms. Branch is a Senior Program Manager with the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE), Madison, WI office. She has been involved in the evaluation of many research projects including; a NIDA funded study on cocaine-exposed infants, a CSAP funded Community Coalition Demonstration grant on ATOD prevention, a NIAAA funded study on managed care and alcohol treatment, a NEA funded study on the neuropsychological development of 9-year old children exposed to cocaine at birth, a DOE funded study on preparing teachers to use technology in the classroom, a State DHMH funded project on minority outreach and technical assistance, a foundation funded project on targeted tobacco media and an OJJDP funded project on community coalition to address crime prevention. Ms. Branch’s expertise lies within community ATOD prevention. Her work with community coalitions has offered her the opportunity to work with community-based ATOD prevention programs. These programs, all different in scope and target population, required the constant integration of new evaluation techniques and methodologies in order to capture and evaluate the unique aspects of each program while at the same time, ensuring that techniques and methodologies were similar enough to allow for comparisons across programs. Ms. Branch’s background in working with many types of at-risk populations and ethnic groups, prior to and including her employment at PIRE, has been instrumental in addressing cultural competency issues in conducting evaluations. With the changing role of the evaluator in community-based prevention efforts, Ms. Branch has been instrumental in assisting community-based prevention programs in designing and implementing research-based, state-of-the-art prevention programs and integrating evaluations in the process. In addition, Ms. Branch has conducted workshops on Program Evaluation, Grant Writing, and Cultural Competence in Outreach to Minority Communities. These workshops have been presented to the Prince George’s County Health Department, the Maryland Center at Bowie State University, and the NPN and AEA conferences. Recently, Ms. Branch’s work has included evaluating education-based intervention programs. She was the evaluation coordinator for two programs at Bowie State University’s School of Education. One project evaluated the impact of a balanced literacy intervention on public school teachers and the other project evaluated the impact of increasing the capacity of university faculty, students and county teachers in the use of technology in the classroom. Currently, Ms. Branch is the evaluation coordinator on the Nevada State Incentive Grant and lives in Carson City, Nevada.