Jen Patashnick discovered Video Intervention/Prevention Assessment (VIA) in 1999 when she was searching for an internship in the spring of her junior year at Brandeis University. Typing into the career center website the keywords “children”, “anthropology”, “photography”, and “medicine” as her interests, the search engine produced one result: VIA. As an intern, Jen spent the summer and fall logging VIA – Overweight data. In her senior year, Jen worked part-time for VIA, and, the day after commencement, Jen joined the VIA staff full time. Her experience with VIA as well as her double major in biology and linguistic anthropology as well as her pre-med coursework helped prepare Jen for the role of Analysis Coordinator in which she is responsible for the analysis of visual narratives created by VIA participants. In the six years that she has been a part of VIA, Jen has developed a unique logging and analysis protocol for the participant-created videotape. The process has changed dramatically from Jen’s own internship days, wherein the tapes were tediously logged by hand onto innumerable sheets of paper. Jen has helped bring VIA into the 21st century by writing macros in Visual Basic so that current VIA interns can log using Microsoft Word.

Further, she has implemented use of QSR’s NVivo qualitative data analysis software to code, structure, and model the data, which has drastically improved VIA’s analysis and output capability over the past five years. Now an internationally recognized expert in qualitative data analysis with QSR software, Jen provides official instruction in the use of several qualitative software packages combined with project consultation to groups and individuals around the country and throughout the world. An increasingly avid traveler, Jen enjoys participating in both national and international conferences, presenting VIA method and projects to a variety of audiences.

When home at “VIA Central”, she coordinates, trains, and supervises teams of volunteer student interns who log VIA data, and contributes to the preparation of grant applications and protocol development, as well as co-authoring VIA’s research papers. In her spare time, Jen can be found teaching and participating in martial arts classes, particularly Uechi-ryu karate in which she has achieved sandan (third degree black belt), writing, cooking, listening to music, and reading. Other interests include photography and theater.