Elizabeth Feder is a qualitative researcher and evaluator at the UW Population Health Institute and conducts work on a range of projects that span public health and health care, including Health Impact Assessments and policy-oriented program evaluations with an emphasis on community mental health and substance use disorders. She has extensive experience working directly with community coalitions to help them develop their capacity for community outreach, strategic planning, program implementation, and evaluation. Her evaluation work is guided by the belief that evaluation is a collaborative tool for promoting social justice.
Her current portfolio of work has a strong emphasis on opioid-misuse prevention, harm reduction, and treatment. Within the last five years she has served as the lead evaluator on projects related to training first responders and the general public in the use of naloxone, connecting overdose survivors in the ED with recovery resources and supports, and educating the public about the dangers of sharing prescription opioids. She also is the lead evaluator of a state-wide Quality Improvement project with WASH (Wisconsin Association of Sober Housing) to test the idea that residences that embrace nationally recognized high-quality standards and engage in continuous quality improvement can improve recovery outcomes for their residents.