Featured Psychologist
Pamela Jumper Thurman, PhD, a Western Cherokee, is a senior research scientist serving as senior affiliate faculty at Colorado State University and president of Council Oak Training and Evaluation, Inc., a female and American Indian owned company. She has 25 years of experience in mental health, substance abuse/epidemiology research and HIV/AIDS Capacity Building Assistance, as well as 35 years in the provision of direct treatment and prevention services as well as community work. She is a co-developer and co-author of the Community Readiness Model and has applied the model in over 3,000 communities throughout the U.S. as well as over 41 communities internationally.
She has worked with cultural issues utilizing community participatory research, prevention of alcohol, tobacco and other drug abuse, methamphetamine treatment and prevention, prevention of violence and victimization, rural women’s concerns, HIV/AIDS and solvent abuse. She currently serves or has served as principal investigator or co-principal investigator for 18 federally funded grants that examine community/grassroots prevention of intimate partner violence, state wide initiatives to prevent methamphetamine use, epidemiology of American Indian substance use, prevention of HIV/AIDS and epidemiology and prevention of solvent use among youth. She is the project director of a CDC funded effort to provide capacity building assistance aimed at community mobilization for HIV/AIDS prevention in ethnic communities throughout the United States.
She has served as a member of the National Center of Substance Abuse Treatment Advisory Council and was also a member of one of Roslyn Carter's caregiving panels as well as participating in First Lady Laura Bush's "Helping America's Youth" initiative. She worked collaboratively with Ohio's First Lady, Hope Taft, in the integration of community readiness into Mrs. Taft's Building Bridges Statewide Project to reduce underage drinking throughout Ohio. She has published extensively on a variety of topics in various books chapters and journals.
Pamela Jumper Thurman, PhD
Senior Research Scientist
Affiliate Faculty
National Center for Community Readiness
Ethnic Studies Department
Colorado State University
350 Aylesworth SE
Fort Collins, Colorado 80523
(918) 801-5055
Professional email
Secondary email
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