Angela DeBello is Vice President for both Strategic Innovation and Public Health Research at NORC. She has more than 15 years of experience managing complex data collection projects. DeBello's areas of expertise are surveillance, health disparities, and environmental health studies that utilize multimode data collection methods, coordination and participation in expert and key stakeholder panels, community outreach, hard-to-reach populations, and qualitative interviewing. She is also responsible for developing strategies for continuous innovation in technology, methodology and other services at NORC.
The trademarks of DeBello's success are her ability to handle multiple, overlapping, and often conflicting priorities while regularly meeting project deadlines; to motivate and gain exceptional commitment from NORC's external partners and to work collaboratively with clients. DeBello also has the ability to develop close relationships with clients, partners, and communities; to stimulate methodological and operational innovation; and to establish clear communication protocols and standard operating procedures for all parts of projects. In leading REACH U.S., the Centers for Disease Contol and Prevention's flagship study to evaluate the effects of community-based health disparities interventions DeBello led discussions with community members, grantees, and experts to learn the unique cultural and regional characteristics of each area under surveillance in order to conduct a multiyear data collection effort. Her involvement in REACH U.S.'s methodological research took the forms of leader and innovator - in both roles she pioneered new methodologies that represent the peak of scientific rigor, practicality for real-world application, and the utmost sensitivity to communities' needs.
DeBello also leads NORC's involvement in the National Children's Study (NCS), which combines in-person, mail and telephone interviewing as well as several biospecimen and environmental measures. In her role as lead coordinator for data collection on multiple NCS sites, she is leading, co-leading, or participating in multiple teams across the US�conducting literature reviews and synthesis, community outreach, chairing stakeholder meetings, pilot testing enrollment methodologies and revising county-specific sampling designs that incorporate local perspectives within the national NCS sample plan. DeBello also led the first subcommittee on the evaluation of grantee applications for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Disparities Solutions Network, which awards funding to grantee coalitions to implement provider-level interventions in order to reduce disparities in community health center populations.