The Team
Our Founder
PubTrawlr was founded by Dr. Jonathan Scaccia, a community psychologist, and evaluator with 20+ years of experience working in community-based settings. His career began as a substance-abuse counselor in North Philadelphia, where he was heavily involved in taking treatment outside of the office and into the community. As a result, he pursued graduate studies at the University of South Carolina, which has fueled a lengthy and varied profession assisting individuals and organizations in working toward community-wide health and wellness.
One of the most frequent challenges he encountered, whether in schools, coalitions, or military bases, was a desire to rely on scientific findings coupled with an inability to do so. People wanted to use best practices. It was simply too difficult to stay up with everything. He created Pubtrawlr to solve this part of the implementation gap by making it more straightforward and fun.
Dr. Scaccia also founded the innovative evaluation firm The Dawn Chorus Group, which specializes in the application of organizational and community readiness. He serves as the Chair of the Board of Conexio Care and Coras Wellness.
The Advisory Board
PubTrawlr is able to draw from a wide range of internationally-recognized experts who have equity, advancement, and social good at the top of their agenda.
Dr. Victoria Scott
Dr. Scott is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina: Charlotte. Her work focuses on system-level capacity development and organizational creation, with an emphasis on multidisciplinary methods for promoting individual and collective wellbeing. Dr. Scott works primarily with healthcare systems and community-based organizations. She is particularly interested in a) supporting breastfeeding through community, healthcare system, and workplace interventions; b) building organizational readiness in non-profit and for-profit organizations; c) the science and art of implementation science and quality improvement.
In 2015, Dr. Scott received the Society for Community Research and Action Early Career Award in honor of her commitment to developing and promoting the field of community psychology. She also received the Don Klein Publication Award to Advance Community Psychology Practice for her co-edited book: Community Psychology: Foundations for Practice, which aims to further the competencies of professionals who work in community settings.
Dr. Scott helps PubTrawlr to maintain a focus on accessibility and community psychology values: inclusiveness, evidence, and a desire for social good. She also helps with the scientific dissemination of PubTrawlr’s active research portfolio, including in the high-impact journal Implementation Science.
David Zimmerman
Mr. Zimmerman is the Chief Technology Officer at Mind Design and Development. His broad skill set includes PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, Javascript (plus Vue, Sass, jQuery, node, WordPress, R, and other open-source projects).
He has been involved in the management and development of several customized high-traffic consumer websites and web-based applications including system upkeep, maintenance, and configuration. Trained in employee management and customer relations, he is adept at communicating and adapting to meet demands according to new situations.
Mr. Zimmerman advises PubTrawlr on its technical architecture and functional improvements. He has closely worked with Dr. Scaccia since the inception of PubTrawlr around its functional design and the underlying algorithms.
Dr. Somava Saha
Dr. Saha, MD, MS, serves as Founder and Executive Lead of Well-being and Equity in the World (WE in the World), as well as Executive Lead of the Well Being In the Nation (WIN) Network, which work together to advance inter-generational well-being and equity. Over the last five years, as Vice President at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Dr. Saha founded and led the 100 Million Healthier Lives (100MLives) initiative, which brought together 1850+ partners in 30+ countries reaching more than 500 million people to improve health, wellbeing, and equity.
Previously, Dr. Saha served as Vice President of Patient-Centered Medical Home Development at Cambridge Health Alliance, where she co-led a transformation that improved health outcomes for a safety net population above the national 90th percentile, improved joy and meaning of work for the workforce, and reduced medical expense by 10%. She served as the founding Medical Director of the CHA Revere Family Health Center and the Whidden Hospitalist Service, leading to substantial improvements in access, experience, quality, and cost for safety-net patients.
In 2012, Dr. Saha was recognized as one of ten inaugural Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Young Leaders for her contributions to improving the health of the nation. She has consulted with leaders across the world, including Guyana, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Australia, Tunisia, Denmark, and Brazil. She has appeared on a panel with the Dalai Lama, keynoted conferences around the world, and had her work featured on Sanjay Gupta, the Katie Couric Show, PBS, and CNN. In 2016 she was elected as a Leading Causes of Life Global Fellow.
Dr. Saha helps PubTrawlr to have an equity-focused mission and to ensure that our activities are designed to make the evidence more accessible to front-line researchers, practitioners, and everyday people around the world.
James Osborn
Mr. Osborn is the founder and managing officer of Envest Asset Management, which specializes bringing in ESG/SRI practices to individuals, families, businesses, and non-profits.
Mr. Osborn has worked with TD Securities and TD Bank on clean energy project financing loans. He. began his financial career as an investment banker at UBS Securities, where he placed municipal bonds for state and local governments and other municipalities. He holds an MBA from the Simon Business School at the University of Rochester and a BSE in Chemical Engineering from Villanova.
Mr. Osborn advises PubTrawlr on its progress toward B-lab certification, sustainable practice (both environmentally and financially), and employee management.
Rohit Ramaswamy
Dr. Rohit Ramaswamy, Ph.D., MPH, Grad Dipl. (Bios) is a professor on implementation at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. He was previously a Clinical Associate Professor in the Public Health Leadership and Maternal and Child Health at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the co-director of the UNC/RTI Consortium for Implementation Science and the Associate Director for Global Practice at the Gillings Global Gateway. Dr. Ramaswamy previously directed the Center for Global Learning whose mission is to advance the research and practice of using the internet and mobile technologies to build the public health management skills of health and development workers around the world.
Dr. Ramaswamy’s area of expertise is Applied Implementation Science, which is the development and evaluation of systematic methods and tools to sustainably implement complex interventions in low-resource settings. His work blends the tools of design thinking, implementation science, and continuous quality improvement to build local capacity. His global projects include the improvement of clinical and operational processes in tertiary maternity hospitals in Ghana, developing the quality improvement capability of district-level government staff in Kenya, and integrating mental health service delivery into the district primary health care system in India.
Prior to joining UNC, Dr. Ramaswamy was the president of Service Design Solutions, a consulting company focusing on developing quality improvement strategies for large global corporations. He is the author of two books: Design and Management of Service Processes, and Improving Testing: Applying Process Tools and Techniques to Assure Quality.
Dr. Ramaswamy has a Bachelor of Technology degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, MS and Ph.D. degrees in Civil Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MPH degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a Graduate Diploma in Biostatistics from the University of Sydney.
Dr. Ramaswamy advises PubTrawlr on scientific rigor, design principles, and global applications.