Jorge A. Montoya, PhD
President and CEO

Dr. Montoya brings extensive government sector, commercial, and academic experience to planning and evaluating public health and education programs. He began his career in research as an undergraduate in the early 1990s studying psychology at UC Berkeley, where he developed an interest in how people process information in their social environment. After receiving his PhD in social psychology from the University of Southern California in 2000, Jorge served as a Research Analyst at Frank N. Magid Associates, where he conducted quantitative and qualitative branding and consumer research across the United States and Latin America. While at Magid, he conducted hundreds of focus groups and interviews; developed dozens of questionnaires, interview guides, and surveys in both English and Spanish; and used this research to create effective branding and products for clients.

He next served as Director of Communications and Program Evaluation for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health’s Sexually Transmitted Disease Program from 2002-2011. In this role, he directed the development, implementation, and evaluation of large-scale community interventions designed to reach audiences such as health providers, students, and low-income Hispanic and African-American youth throughout Los Angeles County. He applied the skills he developed in the private sector to develop strong brands for several award-winning social marketing campaigns, such as I Know and Check Yourself. He developed outreach programs for STI testing and prevention, as well as innovative Internet-based programs including a county-wide, free home STI test kit for women. While working at the DPH, Jorge conducted several large-scale HIV and STI research projects and taught program evaluation at the University of Southern California. He published articles on branding for social marketing, social marketing evaluation, and HIV and STI risk behaviors, and delivered research findings at numerous conferences on effective programs and evaluation strategies.

As President and CEO of Sentient Research, Jorge has brought together a team of highly qualified experts to conduct rigorous quantitative and qualitative research, create effective programs, and perform rigorous program evaluation. Jorge has spearheaded many important programs at Sentient, including: managing a community-based participatory research project to help reduce STI disparities in South Los Angeles; creating an HIV case management system that is being used across the United States and internationally; developing and evaluating a country-wide entertainment-education program on prime time television in Mexico; and conducting large-scale evaluations for programs in HIV, valley fever, asthma, nutrition, and substance use. All of these projects were planned and evaluated using extensive qualitative and quantitative research.

Aaron Plant, MPH
Vice President

Aaron has worked in public service for twenty years. He began his career as a paraprofessional in special education while studying folklore at UC Berkeley in the early 1990s. After getting his BA, he began working at UC San Francisco as a producer for the award-winning international HIV website, HIV inSite. From there, he moved back and forth for several years between the private and nonprofit sectors, and between San Francisco and New York City, managing large-scale health websites for companies like WebMD and Medscape and nonprofit organizations such as GMHC.

During this time, Aaron became interested in using the Internet to do more than simply deliver health information, but as a way to bring about positive behavior change. Toward this goal, he moved back to California to get his Master’s in Public Health from UCLA, which he received in 2005. For the next seven years, Aaron worked for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, where he specialized in planning, implementing, and evaluating social marketing campaigns and developing web-based prevention and testing programs. His work at the DPH included managing a very busy team of outreach workers, helping set up an Internet partner notification program, conducting quantitative and qualitative research studies in STIs and HIV, and publishing papers on qualitative research, social marketing, online partner notification, program evaluation, and online STI testing programs.

Aaron co-founded Sentient Research with Dr. Montoya, and has since managed numerous quantitative and qualitative research projects, developed highly effective interventions, and carried out program evaluations. He has created numerous video and technology based programs, including: Project U, a CDC-funded program that utilizes text messaging and peer outreach to deliver sexual health and free condoms to high school students; Practice Self-Regulation, an e-learning intervention which helps adolescents manage their emotions to reduce STIs and unplanned pregnancies; Taking Care of Me, a brief entertainment-education video intervention that improves rates of HIV treatment initiation and viral suppression and is on CDC’s Compendium of Evidence-Based Interventions and Best Practices for HIV Prevention; and Plan A, an entertainment-education video that was found to increase STI testing and effective contraception use among young women in a 4-year randomized controlled trial. To create these programs, Aaron drew on his technology background and collaborated closely with community members through focus groups, interviews, observations, and human-centered design.

Deborah Neffa-Creech, PhD
Director of Research & Evaluation

Deborah earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the UNC-Chapel Hill Hussman School of Journalism and Media, where she earned a certificate in interdisciplinary health communication – offered with the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health – and worked on social marketing initiatives with nonprofit and public health organizations. After completing her MA, Deborah spent four years in Charlotte as a communications specialist at Atrium Health, one of the nation’s largest nonprofit health systems. She developed campaigns to prompt patient and provider behavior change, while supporting strategic communications for Atrium’s international medical outreach program, patient experience department, and diversity and inclusion initiatives.

Eager to gain additional research skills, Deborah moved to Los Angeles and earned a PhD in health communication from the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. There, she gained expertise in study design and in varying approaches to data collection and analysis, including interviews, focus groups, surveys, field experiments, scale development, social network analyses, and structural equation modeling. At Annenberg, she was a research assistant for the Metamorphosis Research Group and for a randomized controlled trial funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. For her dissertation, she partnered with Children’s Hospital Los Angeles to explore adolescent and family use of media for management of type 2 diabetes. Deborah has presented her research 18 times at professional and academic conferences and has published a book chapter and several articles in peer-reviewed journals. She has also served as a reviewer for communication and public health journals, as well as a senior editorial assistant for the International Journal of Communication.

Deborah specializes in social sciences research, with an emphasis on health behaviors, interpersonal communication, and technology use. She is a native Spanish speaker. At Sentient Research, she is responsible for helping with projects from development to evaluation using quantitative and qualitative research and analysis techniques.

Sapna Suresh, PhD
Senior Research Associate

Sapna Suresh is a social-behavioral scientist interested in how different communication strategies can create positive social change. After earning her BA (Rice University, 2018) in Policy Studies, Sapna spent a year with the organizational consulting firm Korn Ferry, honing her skills in client relationship management and qualitative research in business-focused settings. Interested in further developing her research capabilities, she pursued a combined MA/PhD from Northwestern University’s School of Communication (2020, 2024).

During her tenure at Northwestern, Sapna was a member of the Center of Media Psychology and Social Influence. In this research lab, she pursued multiple projects focused on how media messages can strategically be used to elicit pro-social attitudes and behaviors. The contexts of these studies included the promotion of environmentally-friendly behaviors, improving attitudes towards contraceptives, and combatting the spread of health misinformation. Over the course of her five-year graduate program, Sapna developed strong skills in quantitative methodologies, including experiments, surveys, meta-analyses, and content-analyses. As the lead on several projects, she also enhanced her capabilities in project, vendor, and budget management, and academic writing.

Additionally interested in the real-world applications of her research, she collaborated with several external organizations including Population Media Center and Sentient Research. These partnerships offered her the opportunity to engage with researchers from interdisciplinary backgrounds, work with large-scale datasets, understand the nuances in communication strategies for diverse populations, round out her experience with qualitative methods, and draft summative reports for stakeholders beyond the research community. She currently serves as a peer reviewer for Health Communication and has been recognized for the merit of her work through awards from the Havey Institute for Global Health, Bowling Green State University, BioNJ, and the National Communication Association.

At Sentient Research, Sapna handles projects from formative through evaluative stages using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. She contributes her expertise in communications to the development of theory-driven, effective behavior change programs utilizing entertainment-education and technology. She has presented her research at 10 conferences, delivered 5 invited presentations, and published 8 articles in peer reviewed journals.

JoAnne Keatley, MSW
Senior Program Consultant

Innovative Response Globally for Trans Women and HIV (IRGT) Board Chair, JoAnne Keatley, was born in Mexico City and received a Master of Social Welfare degree from the University of California, Berkeley. JoAnne was the founder and Director of the renowned UCSF Center of Excellence for Transgender Health (CoE). The CoE worked diligently to enhance transgender care services in California, the nation and the world. In partnership with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), JoAnne co-authored the PAHO document “Blueprint for the Provision of Comprehensive Care to Transgender and Transsexual persons and their communities in Latin America and the Caribbean” that has impacted the quality of transgender care throughout the region. JoAnne has worked with Sentient Research previously and was the primary consultant for the CDC funded Toolkit for Providing HIV Prevention Services to Transgender Women of Color. She has directed numerous research and HIV projects and has consulted on transgender health at the World Health Organization, the NIH, CDC, PEPFAR, and beyond. JoAnne has received numerous awards and recognition including, in 2001, being the first staff recipient of the UCSF Chancellor’s Award for LGBT Leadership, in 2009 the UCSF Martin Luther King Jr. Chancellor’s Award for advancing cultural diversity and social justice, in 2010 the Kaiser National HIV/AIDS award for diversity and was recognized by the State of California for advancing the health of transgender Californians.

At Sentient Research, JoAnne is the subject matter expert and program consultant for a CDC-funded program to adapt an evidence-based HIV intervention for Black and Latina transgender women.

Greg Szekeres, BA
Senior Research Consultant

Greg is a dedicated, visionary operations and program executive with 25+ years’ experience creating and managing complex programs and partnerships, particularly within academic and nonprofit institutions. He has demonstrated expertise in successful implementation of high-profile and high-impact education, capacity building, policy development, and research enterprises, both domestic and international.

Greg earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. After completing his BA, he worked at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, first as a research analyst strategizing the enrollment of adolescents and young adults into federally and industry-funded HIV clinical trials, then directing the development and production of content on 10 large, high-profile, medical information websites at UCSF for domestic and international professional audiences. From 2003-2019, Greg was Managing Director of the Center for World Health at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. There, he was responsible for the high-level development of vision, strategic planning, and oversight of all programs; operationalized the Center’s vision and mission, and led the planning, development, implementation, and monitoring for a diverse array of international academic activities. Among other research programs, he planned and oversaw a 7-year, $50+ million NIH-funded clinical trial on HIV prevention at 48 sites in four countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, including day-to-day global operations and coordinating over 15 U.S. and international partner academic intuitions and their institutional review boards (IRBs). Since 2016, Greg has provided tailored consulting services related to global and domestic health research, policy, program development, and evaluation; academic, nonprofit, and philanthropic programming and partnerships; and climate change and planetary health. He is an author on 24 papers published in peer-reviewed scientific and medical journals and numerous policy reports and white papers.

At Sentient Research, Greg project manages and contributes to the development and writing on a variety of programs, including quantitative and qualitative research, policy papers, and multimedia projects. His primary focus in on the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) Child And Youth Behavioral Health Initiative (CYBHI), the goal of which is to reimagine the systems that support behavioral health and wellness for California’s children and youth into an innovative, up-stream focused ecosystem.

Taj Morgan, MPH
Program Manager

Taj is a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he received a Master’s in Public Health. The focus of his studies was health behavior, specifically with regard to sexual and reproductive health. Taj also holds a Certificate in Innovation for the Public Good (CIPG). After receiving his BS from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Taj served as an HIV Health Care Navigator and Project Coordinator at Duke University’s Center for Health Policy and Inequalities Research (CHPIR). He assisted on Project STYLE 2.0, a program for Young, Black MSM who are living with HIV. As a Health Care Navigator, Taj provided participants with linkage to medical and mental health services, as well as virtual support through a mobile health app, HealthMPowerment (HMP).

Taj’s experiences within STYLE 2.0 led him to further exploring his interest in HIV/STIs and MSM health disparities. He had the opportunity to serve as a Research Assistant at UNC’s Behavior and Technology Lab (BATLab). He also worked on another HealthMPowerment project, HMP Stigma, which is a mobile health intervention for young, Black & Latinx men and transgender women. Extracurricularly, Taj explored social innovation and entrepreneurship through his participation in CIPG, where he had the opportunity to ideate and pitch a sexual health communication app for young adults. The CIPG program equipped Taj with the mindsets, methods, and tools for human-centered design and systems thinking.

Brandy Brown, MPH, MSW
Program Manager

Brandy Brown, MPH, MSW is the Young United Parents! (YUP!) program manager at Sentient Research. Brandy has always been drawn to education, counseling and public health. As a busy single mother, she works to balance her career and motherhood. She recently finished a double master’s degree in public health and social work at the University of California, Los Angeles, with an emphasis on reproductive health, maternal and child health, and child and family wellbeing. Brandy also runs a baking business and works as a birth doula and lactation educator. A former young parent herself, Brandy co-manages the YUP! Youth Advisory Council, creates content with young parents, and is the co-host and co-creator of “YUP! the podcast.”

At the forefront of it all is Brandy’s role as a mother which guides her passion and drive within the space of youth/adolescent reproductive health and parenting outcomes. Brandy was born to 15 year old parents and witnessed the stigma and struggle of teenage parenting. Brandy’s drive and motivation for working with young parents is birthed out of the needs of young people to be seen, heard, and validated in their parenting journeys. As a doula, she seeks to address health disparities, impact maternal and child birth outcomes, and destigmatize adolescent parenting. Finally, Brandy loves collaboration. Between co-hosting YUP!’s new innovative podcast to managing an incredible team of young parents, Brandy’s work relies heavily on sharing ideas, learning from diverse voices, and supporting others on their own growth journeys.

Divine Justice Hilliard, BA
Young Parent Mentor

Divine Justice Hilliard holds a Bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in business from Wilson College. Divine conducted a  longitudinal research study for her senior project on single mothers and mental health. Her research focused on mothers’ mental health predictors, specifically financial resources, social support, day-to-day stressors, and coping strategies. During this time, she gained experience in study design, data collection and data analysis. 

At Sentient Research, Divine serves as a peer mentor for young parents in the YUP! community, advisory council youth group leader, social media manager, published author, content creator, and YUP! podcast co-host. Divine works with culturally diverse young parents across the country to provide informational and emotional support as well as resources to reach their goals and live healthier lives.  She is committed to giving back to her own community by equipping young parents with the tools, representation, and support they need.  With first hand experience of struggles and triumphs faced by young parents, Divine aspires to create ripple effects of positive change, ensuring that every young parent has the opportunity to succeed.

Justice McNeil, BA
Young Parent Mentor

Justice McNeil holds a B.A. in Communication and Social Influence from Temple University with a minor in Africology and African American Studies. At Sentient Research, Justice is a mentor for young mothers in the YUP! Community. As a YUP! mentor, Justice works with young mothers and uses motivational interviewing to support participants regarding pregnancy, birth, parenting, relationships, sexual health, and self-care. She guides these mothers based on her education and experience as a young mother herself. 

In addition to her work at Sentient Research, Justice is also a birth worker, supporting expecting parents through their pregnancy, birth, and postpartum journeys. She advocates for these parents and provides continuous emotional, physical, educational and informational support for them to make informed decisions.

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