She has been continuously supported by federal grant funding since 2007. Her work has included translational studies investigating the association of inflammation, immune activation and immunodeficiency with risk for HIV- associated lung diseases. Her recent work includes clinical trials that seek to improve care for lung conditions in persons living with HIV (PLWH), including a proactive e-consult intervention for PLWH who have COPD to improve quality of care and a smoking cessation intervention tailored to PLWH who smoke. She additionally has funding to study how to tailor shared decision making for lung cancer screening for PLWH, and is participating in several lung cancer and COVID-19 related projects within VA.

Dr. Crothers received her medical degree from Yale University, completed her medicine residency at Stanford and her pulmonary and critical care medicine fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Crothers has been a faculty member at the University of Washington since 2009, and moved to the VA Puget Sound in 2018 from Harborview Medical Center..

Funding for Dr. Crothers’ work comes from the National Institutes of Health and Department of Veterans Affairs.

…received her medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas, and completed internal medicine residency training and a fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of Washington. She earned a MS degree in Epidemiology from the University of Washington School of Public Health, completed a post-doctoral fellowship in health services research at the VA Puget Sound, and received formal training in implementation science from the NIH/VA Training Institute for Dissemination & Implementation Research in Health.

Dr. Feemster’s research focuses on assessing quality of care and improving care delivery for patients with chronic obstructive lung disease (COPD), including both implementation of evidence-based practices and de-implementation of low-value therapies that are ineffective and potentially harmful. She is the PI of a VA HSR&D Merit Award (IIR) designed to inform VA about current practices for the provision of oxygen therapy nationally among patients with COPD. She is Co-Director of the newly funded Seattle VA Cooperative Studies Program (CSP) Network of Dedicated Enrollment Sites (NODES) site, which is one of 23 centers across the country dedicated to increasing enrollment, enhancing safety and participant experience, and improving efficiency and quality of CSP research on key health conditions that impact our nation’s Veterans. She also serves as the Co-PI of the American Lung Association (ALA) Pacific Northwest Airways Clinical Research Center, part of a network of centers that conducts multi-center clinical trials and observational studies among patients with asthma and COPD. She was the Site-PI for two recently completed NIH-funded multi-center randomized clinical trials focusing on improving clinical outcomes among patients with COPD. She has additional expertise conducting observational and mixed-methods studies, including quantitative analysis of administrative databases and qualitative analyses. In addition, since July of 2021 she has Co-Directed the Seattle COIN’s post-doctoral MD health services research fellowship. She is a member of the VA Pulmonary Field Advisory Council and the ALA’s Scientific Advisory Board. She chairs the ALA Public Policy and Population Health Grant Review Committee and is Vice-Chair of the American Thoracic Society’s Quality Improvement and Implementation Committee.