Hildie is a senior research director in the Health Sciences department at NORC at the University of Chicago with over 10 years of experience in project management, training, evaluation, and data governance with subject matter expertise in substance use prevention and intervention strategies.

For five years, Hildie served as the project manager for the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation’s Adolescent SBIRT Initiative where she oversaw the development and dissemination of a comprehensive curriculum to train current and future health care practitioners to have conversations with youth about substance use. As part of the initiative, she coordinated a monthly Learning Collaborative where educators shared best practices, barriers and facilitators, and innovative ideas for implementing adolescent SBIRT (Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment) programs. The project trained over 25,000 individuals and involved over 600 universities/colleges and organizations. As part of this work, Hildie also directed a large-scale evaluation of the impact of the training on learner outcomes.

Additionally, Hildie served as the Learning Community lead for AHRQ’s Managing Unhealthy Alcohol Use in Primary Care where she coordinated two monthly workgroups and an online resource sharing platform for six grantee teams implementing SBIRT and medication-assisted treatment strategies in primary care settings.

She also directs many other training, technical assistance, and evaluation projects that help organizations and institutions implement SBIRT and/or prevention and intervention programs for a variety of mental health concerns such as suicide risk. For instance, she serves as the program manager for ND HOPES, a suicide prevention project managed by the University of North Dakota and funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with the goal to reduce suicide morbidity and mortality by 10% over five years in western North Dakota through raising awareness, training, and providing enhanced services.

Hildie has a Master’s in Sociology from Northwestern University and a Master’s in Education in Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics, and Assessment from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Hildie has a particular interest in participatory research and served as a Board Member for the American Evaluation Association’s Arizona Chapter (AZEnet).