April 2013 VSTH Meeting Speakers

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Speakers' Biographies

Lorrie Gavin, MPH, PhD

Senior Health Scientist, Division of Reproductive Health, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, CDC

Lorrie Gavin, MPH, PhD, is a senior health scientist in the Division of Reproductive Health. She is responsible for coordinating the division’s teen pregnancy prevention activities, and she serves as the agency liaison to the Office of Population Affairs’ Title X program and the Committee on Adolescence of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Dr. Gavin has spent her career focusing on adolescent sexual and reproductive health in both global and domestic settings, and she has published extensively on these topics.

Dr. Gavin earned her master’s of public health degree at Emory University and her doctorate in public health from Johns Hopkins University.

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Kristen Plastino, PharmD, MD

Director, UT Teen Health; Associate Professor, Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio

Kristen Plastino, PharmD, MD, is a board-certified obstetrics and gynecology physician. In 2003, she began implementing a sex education curriculum, educating adolescents and adults on the benefits of delaying sexual activity. She reached more than 130,000 students in 27 public school districts during the course of this project. In 2010, she initiated a community-wide initiative in south San Antonio with a focus on decreasing the teen birth rate, decreasing the repeat teen birth rate, and mobilizing the community to sustain teen pregnancy prevention. In addition, Dr. Plastino oversees a project to provide a high school saturation method of delivering health and sexuality information using innovative implementation strategies to increase intensity of messaging to a diverse high school student population.

Dr. Plastino earned her medical degree from the University of South Florida in 1999 and completed her residency at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio in 2003. Her special interests are adolescent gynecology, adolescent reproductive health, and contraception.

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Shelby R. Pons, MSW

State Director of Teen Parent Programs, Connecticut State Department of Education, Bureau of Health, Nutrition, Family Services and Adult Education

Shelby Pons, MSW, is the state director for teenage parent programs at the Connecticut State Department of Education, where she develops programs and policies designed to support young families, and helps communities and schools work together for student success.

As a 15-year employee of the Connecticut State Department of Education, and a member of the Connecticut School-Family-Community Partnership Project, Pons assists educators, parents, and community members in the development of essential partnerships. She does this by providing training and resources that promote effective local policies and practices, and by increasing public awareness of the positive impact of school-family-community partnerships on student learning.

Pons has conducted social-marketing research on outreach approaches and how they engage parents and create family learning communities. She has used this research to develop materials for families and literacy training curricula for professionals.

Pons has a master’s degree in social work from the Nancy A. Humphreys Institute for Political Social Work at the University of Connecticut.

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