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Select a name from the list below to read the full biography:
 Colleen Walsh serves as the Staff
Anthropologist and Research Director for the Cobalt Group. In this capacity,
she provides Cobalt Group clients with quantitative/qualitative research and
project management services. Her core competencies include: community
engagement and outreach; defining research objectives and methodology;
designing and testing data collection tools; executing data collection
activities; conducting data analysis and synthesis; preparing final report
documents; and conducting program evaluations.
In
her role as Research Director, Ms. Walsh has served as coordinator of several
long-term planning and development initiatives projects in the cities of
Cleveland, Willowick, and Ashtabula, Ohio, Baltimore, Maryland, and Naples,
Florida. She served as research coordinator for the Cleveland City Council
Operations and Sustainability Planning Process (Phase 1 and 2) in 2008 where
she was responsible for designing interview questions, conducting interviews
with City Council staff, and analyzing all primary and secondary data collected
in Phase I of the process. These data helped to inform the recommendations on
how to make Council operations more efficient.
Ms.
Walsh also served as the Research Director for the Ward 6 Healthy Neighborhood
Initiative in 2005, which lead to a subsequent engagement with the Cleveland
Foundation to identify additional categories of indicators with which the
foundation community in Northeast Ohio could use to prioritize funding
decisions and integrate funding across a variety of funding areas. In addition
to economic indicators, the Cobalt Group research team identified a set of
robust indicators in human, social and cultural capital. These sets of
indicators continue to grow as they are used and tested in the field during
program design and development phases for many local projects.
As
a Fellow in the Urban Health program in the Department of Anthropology at Case
Western Reserve University where she is pursuing her Doctorate in Medical
Anthropology, she has served as a research assistant to three faculty members,
assisting them with their undergraduate class instruction as well as with their
ongoing research projects and publication development. She has worked on a
student-faculty research project that examined domestic violence as a public
health issue in East Cleveland and surrounding communities among patients of
Huron Hospital. Ms. Walsh assisted in
developing the research tools, conducted interviews with patients, and
participated in the qualitative analysis of the research data.
Ms. Walsh received her Bachelor’s of Arts in
Anthropology and Master’s of Arts in Medical Anthropology from Case Western
Reserve University. She is currently working on completing her Ph.D. at CWRU
and is conducting her dissertation research among community gardens in
Cleveland neighborhoods. She has done broad research on many health related,
social capital and cultural topics and has experience working in diverse
communities. Her current research interests involve racial and ethnic
disparities in health and the use of anthropological and political economic
models to try to illuminate causes of and solutions to health problems
associated with urban living. Her dissertation research examines the concept of
‘social capital’ among community gardeners to explore the ways in which
perceptions and experiences of ‘social capital’ might vary by race, class,
gender, and neighborhood and contribute to an understanding of the influence of
culture and context on community development projects such as community
gardens.
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