Dr. Lara Savas is a behavioral epidemiologist, associate professor of Health Promotion and Behavioral Sciences, a member of the Center for Health Promotion and Prevention Research at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Public Health, and a member of the Institute for Implementation Science at UTHealth Houston. Her areas of expertise include conducting multi-level intervention and dissemination and implementation research. She has a strong focus on community-engaged research focused on improving health and health equity, particularly in the areas of cancer prevention and control.
Additionally, Dr. Savas is the program director of several CPRIT-funded interventions, including Program Director and developer of the Salud en Mis Manos program, and a multi-principal investigator (MPI) of the CPRIT-funded Adolescent Vaccination Program and AVP-Implementation Tool. She has co-led the AVP-IT team in the design of the online implementation support tool aimed at facilitating the implementation of effective clinic-based system-, provider-, and parent-targeted intervention strategies to increase HPV vaccination rates. She currently leads the expansion of Salud en Mis Manos, a CPRIT-funded community-based program proven to effectively increase cancer screenings among underserved women in Texas. She serves as an MPI on the Texas Prevention Research Center’s core research project focused on developing and evaluating an implementation intervention for clinic systems to promote the implementation of a behavioral intervention to increase breast and cervical cancer screening and HPV vaccination among low-income groups, called Salud en Mis Manos-Dissemination and Implementation Assistance (SEMM-DIA). Dr. Savas is a recipient of the 2023 UTHealth Houston SPH Excellence in Community Service.
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