Biography
Dr. Ritt-Olson, an associate professor in residence in the Department of Health, Society, & Behavior, is an expert in mental health as a public health issue. Dr Ritt-Olson’s work focuses on factors that promote mental health, resiliency, and well-being among culturally diverse adolescents and young adults. Her recent efforts have expanded my passion for digital approaches to more novel ways of utilizing social media and technology to improve health. She recently participated in the mHealth Training Institute (mHTI), a program funded by the NIH to expand transdisciplinary approaches to mHealth, led by world leaders in mobile health research.
Dr Ritt-Olson is the director of training and engagement for the CERES (connecting the EdTech Research Ecosystem) initiative, a multi-site international collaborative focused on utilizing digital means to improve the educational opportunities and well-being of young people globally. The CERES project brings together researchers from a vast array of disciplines to better address well-being through digital means. Young people, who have endured the trauma of the cancer experience, need support as they navigate the challenges associated with survivorship. She seeks to both better understand the risk factors as well as design interventions to protect this population through community-based interventions that draw on digital technologies to better extend the reach and appeal of the content. Some of her current work employs co-design principles to collaboratively design pilot drafts of interventions to connect survivors with care, and draw on the lessons learned to better craft this work. Dr Ritt-Olson participated in the NIH bootcamp at UCI and is currently the Chao Family Cancer Center’s Research MET Fellow.
Research Interests
Dr. Ritt-Olson believes that we meet people where they are, and many adolescents and young adults are often found on social media. Her work now focuses on the ways to engage social media platforms to connect people with existing resources to better address unmet needs. Additionally, Dr. Ritt-Olson explores the factors that promote mental health, resiliency, and well-being among culturally diverse adolescents and young adults. This work covers multiple health risk behaviors including substance use prevention, identity development, access to care and increasing general self-efficacy. She works with varied populations including cancer survivors, middle school students, as well as other vulnerable groups. She has designed, taught and evaluated 20+ health promoting programs both globally and nationally using varied modalities including innovative technologies. She teaches across several levels of education: undergraduate, graduate, and medical fellows drawing upon social determination theory as a guide to engaging students by building autonomy, competence, and relatedness in person and online.
Current Projects/Studies
- Director of the training program at Connecting the Ed-tech Research Ecosystem (CERES), an initiative aimed at bringing bring scholars and designers together with emerging leaders, promising junior specialists, and entrepreneurs to shape the future of educational and child-focused technologies.
- “Empowering Adolescent and Young Adult Cancer Survivors: A Social Media-Based Intervention to Enhance Well-being and Reduce Tobacco Use” Role: Principal Investigator
- “Improving Cancer Related Follow-Up Care Among Hispanic and non-Hispanic Childhood Cancer Survivors”. National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute. To describe factors that address cancer follow-up care among ethnically diverse cancer survivors. Role: Co-Investigator. 10%
- “Health behaviors among emerging adult survivors of childhood cancers.” Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program (TRDRP) (Joel Milam) Role: Co-Investigator. 10%, CERES Connecting the EdTech Research Ecosystem (Co-I)
Education
- PhD in Preventative Medicine from the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine (2005)
- Master’s degree in Psychology from California State University, Long Beach (1997)
Honors and Awards
- 2020: H-Index Score: 38
- 2003 – 2004: Cancer Fellow at National Cancer Institute
- 1995 – 1997: Outstanding Graduate Student, California State University, Long Beach
