Dr. Wieczorek first joined PIRE in 2018 as a Senior Research Scientist with an initial focus on developing projects in response to the opioid epidemic, including a NIDA-funded grant to examine access to buprenorphine in the field immediately after an overdose recovery.

Dr. Wieczorek’s career extends over 30 years as an active researcher and public health practitioner. He has been the Principal Investigator (PI) or Co-PI on over 20 grants funded by the National Institutes of Health, and PI on over 50 grants and contracts funded by state and local agencies and private foundations. His research interests are broad and cross a number of disciplines, including notable contributions in the fields of impaired driving, suicide, geospatial analysis, gambling, developmental psychopathology, opioid misuse, and population health improvement. The scope of his projects have ranged from a local and state focus to national and international in scale. Dr. Wieczorek co-founded the Institute for Behavioral Medicine at Dalian Medical University in China to support a series of NIMH-funded grants to study patterns of suicides by young women. In addition to his research, Dr. Wieczorek has been highly engaged as a grant reviewer for NIH, CDC, NIJ, private foundations, and for over 30 scientific journals.

Prior to coming to PIRE, he founded the Center for Health and Social Research (1997) and the Institute for Community Health Promotion (2014) at the State University of New York College at Buffalo (Buffalo State), where these entities continue as applied research, teaching, and community resources. He continues to hold academic titles as Director and Professor Emeritus at Buffalo State and as Research Professor of Epidemiology and Environmental Health, adjunct Professor of Community Health and Health Behavior, Research Associate in the School of Social Work, and affiliated Scientist at the Clinical and Research Institute on Addictions at the University at Buffalo.

Dr. Wieczorek attended the University at Buffalo where he received his B.A. (Interdisciplinary Social Sciences awarded with honors), M.A. (Geography), and Ph.D. (Geography awarded 1988).

Prior to joining PIRE, Mr. Klig was the Controller for the Hebrew Home of Greater Washington, a 558 bed long-term care and rehabilitation facility located in Rockville, Maryland. In his capacity as Controller, Mr. Klig was responsible for overseeing the day-to-day financial operations of the Home. Previously, Mr. Klig held Director of Finance and Controller positions in the biotech, construction, finance and retail industries. Mr. Klig earned his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Maryland.

A PIRE employee since May 1992, she has worked on a number of public safety and health related projects. Ms. Gordon was Director of the OJJDP’s Underage Drinking Enforcement Training Center (UDETC), a project PIRE administered for 16 years. In her functional role as a Director, Ms. Gordon managed a three million dollar budget, supervised senior staff and collaborated with over thirty-five enforcement and judicial consultants.

Across her PIRE career, she has been responsible for program administration, strategic policy development and training in several health and behavioral research programs. Ms. Gordon has extensive experience managing complex projects to assure that deliverables are timely and maximally useful to all stakeholders. She has exercised this skill at the state, local, and federal levels, working with diverse and mainstream populations, to improve public health outcomes.

She holds a Master’s Degree from New York University and a Bachelor’s degree from Manhattanville College. Ms. Gordon has more than twenty-five years of professional experience in the field of program administration, research, training and evaluation. Since 1999, Mary also served as a consultant to the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) High School Student Research Apprentice Program.