Welcome New PHS Staff

PHS welcomes the newest additions to our team: Heidi Fall and Michelle van Ryn, PhD, MPH.

Heidi Fall joins PHS as the new administrative specialist in research. Fall will oversee the day-to-day administration of the funded grants and research activity. She will track budgets and publications as well as manage personnel and grant reports. Fall has been at the University of Minnesota for the past six and a half years in the Department of Psychiatry. Most recently she coordinated the child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship program. She has a degree in therapeutic recreation from the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse.

In collaboration with the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, Michelle van Ryn, PhD, MPH, will be training with Bean Robinson, PhD, and Rose Munns, PsyD, to complete her clinical requirements to become a marriage and family therapist. She is an associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health. Van Ryn earned her PhD in social psychology and health, and MPH in health behavior and health education at the University of Michigan where she also completed a two-year fellowship on psychosocial factors and mental health and illness. During this period she won the National Mental Health Association’s award for The Best Preventive Intervention (1990). Over the last 20 years, her research (and now clinical) work has focused on the factors that create effective and empowering helping relationships across settings, circumstances, and diverse patient characteristics.