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About

Elise Lopez, DrPH, MPH, is the Assistant Director of the Relationship Violence Program in the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona. She has worked in health promotion since 2004 in community and research settings. Elise has worked primarily on programs that focus on the design, implementation, and evaluation of interventions related to sexual violence, sexual health, adolescent substance abuse, and trauma-informed care. Current projects include developing and implementing interventions for students found responsible of sexual misconduct, and evaluation of a bar staff bystander intervention training program. She was the recipient of the inaugural Youth, Family and Community Evidence-Based Practice Award from the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 2007. In 2016, she received the Abstract of the Year Award from the Law Section of the American Public Health Association for a co-authored paper on restorative justice innovations for sexual misconduct on college campuses. In 2015, she served as an invited U.S. Delegate to the Ontario Government Women’s Directorate’s Summit on Sexual Violence and Harassment, and in 2017 served as a Liaison to the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section Task Force on College Student Due Process Rights and Victim Protections. She serves as the site preceptor for graduate and undergraduate interns, providing training in sexual violence research methods. She is the chair of the response workgroup of a national collaborative group that develops innovation in college prevention and response to sexual violence. Her work has been published in outlets such as the American Psychologist, City University of New York Law Review, and Alcoholism- Clinical and Experimental Research.

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Skills

Experience

Assistant Director

University of Arizona (UA)

Nov-2018 to Present

Publication

  • dott image October, 2024

Feasibility and Acceptability of a Bar-Staff Bystander Intervention Training Program for Reducing Sexual Aggression

Objective: This paper explores the challenges, opportunities, and successes encountered in implementing Safer Bars, a bystander intervention training program to prevent sexual aggression in...

  • dott image August, 2024

Healing strategies of women who experienced sexual assault: A mixed method analysis

Objective: The primary objective of this study was to identify healing strategies directly from women who experienced sexual assault and sexual exploitation. The second objective was to expl...

  • dott image July, 2024

The Revised Sexual Experiences Survey Victimization Version (SES-V): Conceptualization, Modifications, Items and Scoring

The Sexual Experiences Survey [SES] is considered the gold standard measure of non-consensual sexual experiences. This article introduces a new victimization version [SES-V] developed by a m...

  • dott image June, 2024

Comment on Porat et al. (2024): “Preventing Sexual Violence: A Behavioral Problem Without a Behaviorally Informed Solution”

There is no sugarcoating it: Porat et al. (2024) presented a damning wake-up call to the field of sexual-violence prevention. Their study’s ultimate goals were to identify psychological th...

  • dott image May, 2024

Safer Bars: A cluster-randomized effectiveness evaluation of alcohol-related sexual violence prevention through bar staff bystander training

Background Sexual assault is consistently associated with social contexts that support high levels of alcohol consumption such as alcohol-serving establishments (i.e., bars). The significan...

  • dott image December, 2021

The Scope of Rape Victimization and Perpetration Among National Samples of College Students Across 30 years

Research Questions: Rape prevention practice and policy have roots in data from 1985. This study uses 2015 national data to project recent prevalence, assesses whether rates now differ from ...

  • dott image October, 2021

WhatsApp-Based Focus Groups Among Mexican-Origin Women in Zika Risk Area: Feasibility, Acceptability, and Data Quality

Background: Despite unprecedented advances in worldwide access to the internet via smartphones, barriers to engaging hard-to-reach populations remain in many methods of health research. A p...

Factors predictive of sexual violence: Testing the four pillars of the Confluence Model in a large diverse sample of college men

This article focuses on the characteristics of sexually violent men who have not been convicted of a crime. The objective of this study was to test the four key interrelated pillars of the C...

  • dott image April, 2021

Knowledge of Sexual Transmission of Zika Virus Among Women Who Are Pregnant or Intend to Become Pregnant, Arizona, 2017

Objectives Levels of knowledge about the sexual transmission of Zika virus are consistently low in populations at risk of a mosquito-borne outbreak, including among women of childbearing ag...