Dr. Fortney was trained as a geographer, with an emphasis on spatial economics and econometrics. As a post doctoral fellow, he became the second geographer ever to receive research funding from NIMH. Throughout his career, Dr. Fortney’s research has focused on identifying and overcoming barriers to mental health care for rural populations. Dr. Fortney has used geographic information systems (GIS) to measure travel times to services and to determine the impact of geographical accessibility on utilization and quality. He has also evaluated the impact of opening new VA Community Based Outpatient Clinics in rural areas on veterans’ access and service utilization. More recently, Dr. Fortney has begun developing and disseminating telemedicine-based interventions to improve care for rural primary care patients. Specifically, Dr. Fortney has been using telemedicine technologies (telephones, interactive video, electronic medical records, web-based decision support systems) to help provide team-based collaborative care within a virtual clinical environment, where patients, physicians, therapists, and care mangers are separated from one another by distance. 

Melissa joined the AIMS Center in 2014 and supports various aspects of its education and training programs. Prior to the AIMS Center, she worked in K-12 education as an ESL teacher in New York City and in higher education teaching English at Universidad de Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. Melissa completed a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Northern Colorado and a master’s degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from New York University.

Amritha Bhat, MBBS, MD, MPH is a psychiatrist trained in both India and the United States. Dr. Bhat is currently an assistant professor in the University of Washington Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Bhat completed the UW Psychiatry-Primary Care Fellowship Training Program and earned her Master of Public Health through the UW School of Public Health. She established the perinatal psychiatry clinic at the University of Washington Medical Center and has also implemented screening for depression in mothers whose babies are admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit. In addition, Dr. Bhat is actively involved in projects that make collaborative care for depression available to women during pregnancy and postpartum. 

Kristi Malmstrom joined the AIMS Center in January of 2018 as a Program Assistant, providing support for the implementation of Collaborative Care and a number of AIMS Center projects. Kristi has been a part of the UW community since 2011, as an undergraduate and a staff member. During her time as a student, she provided research assistance in a memory and cognition lab under Geoff Loftus, studying facial recognition as it relates to eye-witness accounts. Kristi graduated from the University of Washington in 2015 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology. Her time in the program fostered an interest in the stigma surrounding mental health and the issue of mental health care accessibility. 

Jessica Whitfield, MD, MPH, serves as an Acting Assistant Professor in the Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine. She is a psychiatric consultant for the UW’s Behavioral Health Integration Program (BHIP) and the Outpatient Psychiatric Clinic at the UW Medical Center. She also provides program assistance for the Integrated Care Training Program Fellowship as a clinical supervisor and co-coordinator for the implementation, quality improvement, and collaborative care rotations. She received her medical degree from Saint Louis University School of Medicine and her Masters of Public Health from Columbia University. She completed her residency in General Adult Psychiatry at Brown University as well as the Integrated Care Training Program Fellowship at UW. 

Sara joined the AIMS Center in March 2020 as an instructional designer, supporting its numerous education and training projects and programs. Before coming to the AIMS Center, she worked at North Seattle College, teaching language and culture, developing curriculum, marketing internationally, and managing and training the staff of the campus tutoring center. Much of her work in higher education focused on equity, access, and representation for non-native English speakers. She also worked as an EFL instructor in Hiroshima, Japan, prior to moving to Seattle.
Sara received a Bachelor of Science degree in Communication Sciences & Disorders from the University of Texas at Austin and completed her Master’s degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) at Seattle University. 

Betsy has a background in Project Management and Data Collection, and supports programs within the Integrated Care Training Program (ICTP) funded by the State of Washington, including the Community Based Integrated Care Fellowship and the Psychiatry and Addictions Case Conference (UW PACC). She works closely with faculty and staff on these programs. She also has an interest in Data Analysis, and is an active member of the ICTP and AIMS Center Analysis Teams. Before joining the AIMS Center in 2016, she worked for Battelle Memorial Institute as Project Manager, overseeing the data collection department in the Seattle office for over 10 years. She has her Project Management Professional Certification, and has been certified since 2012. She is an experience REDCap and SPSS programmer. 

Dr. Denise Chang is a psychiatrist and Clinical Associate Professor in the School of Medicine at the University of Washington.  Dr. Chang completed her medical degree at the University of Iowa and then went on to complete residency training in psychiatry and a fellowship in Consult-Liaison psychiatry at the University of Washington.  Following fellowship, she started on the faculty at the University of Washington, working as a psychiatric consultant for primary care clinics working within a Collaborative Care model.  She is now the Medical Director of the Behavioral Health Integration Program, the University of Washington’s Collaborative Care program, and the Medical Lead for the Mental Health Integration Program, another state-wide Collaborative Care program.  Her faculty appointment also involves work with the Integrated Care Training Program, assisting in training psychiatrists and other health care providers in Collaborative Care. 
Dr. Chang also has substantial experience in quality improvement work and was the Medical Lead for the Depression Population Approach to Health project at the University of Washington, which was part of a larger Transforming Clinical Practice Initiatives grant from the Center of Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Prior to the AIMS Center, Esther was a Research Coordinator for a qualitative research study working to address critical gaps in our current healthcare data collection systems that prohibit the identification of successful and largescale prevention and intervention targets to address injury disparities. She was also a Program Coordinator for a health and racial equity initiative at Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center. She graduated from the University of Washington with her bachelor’s in public health/global health in 2020. 
 
Outside of work, Esther enjoys playing tennis, hiking, and traveling with family and friends. 

Nicole Morrison Winters started at the AIMS Center in 2021 as an Implementation Program Assistant. Previously, she worked for Seattle Public Schools in the early learning department at South Shore, and was the Local Program Coordinator for Mennonite Voluntary Service in Seattle. Outside of work, Nicole enjoys hiking, gardening, culinary arts, playing board games with her family, and building community.