Family Health Centers of San Diego

Established in 1970, Family Health Centers of San Diego (FHCSD) is one of the country’s largest Federally Qualified Health Centers, servicing 49 clinics throughout San Diego County. The mission of FHCSD is to increase access to quality healthcare to low-income and medically underserved populations. In October 2019, FHCSD launched the Laura Rodriguez Research Institute to ensure that health innovation engages and benefits the uninsured, low income, and medically underserved population.

Research Collaboration Guidelines

FHCSD has Research Collaboration Guidelines, a Research Interest Form, and a process for submitting research interest requests.

Please review the Research Guidelines located Here.

Please print and fill out the Research Interest form located Here and the Addendum located Here.

Return proposal request and supplemental information to the FHCSD Department of LRRI Team at LRRI@fhcsd.org

For more information

To learn more our about Partner Organization, click HERE.

Job Godino

Dr. Godino is the scientific director of the Laura Rodriguez Research Institute and the director of quality improvement and innovation at Family Health Centers of San Diego (FHCSD). His research, largely funded by the National Institutes of Health, focuses on developing and evaluating interventions using mobile and wearable technology to promote healthy changes in physical activity, sedentary behavior, diet and sleep. In addition, Dr. Godino leads pragmatic quality improvement research efforts within the primary care setting. These efforts are designed to enhance patient care and population health outcomes by integrating evidence-based practices and innovative technologies into everyday clinical workflows. His projects often involve close collaboration with operational leaders, health care providers and patients to ensure that the interventions are effective and sustainable in real-world settings. By focusing on pragmatic research, Dr. Godino aims to bridge the gap between research findings and actual clinical practice, ultimately improving the quality of care delivered to patients.

Dr. Godino holds a B.A. in anthropology and an M.S. in epidemiology from Temple University, and a Ph.D. in epidemiology from the University of Cambridge. He completed his postdoctoral training in the epidemiology and biostatistics of aging at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Godino is also an associate research scientist at UC San Diego’s Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science. He directs the Exercise and Physical Activity Resource Center (EPARC), a university recharge unit specializing in deep phenotyping. Dr. Godino will serve as the Principal Investigator in this collaboration with the SDSU HealthLINK Center. 

Jane Samaniego

Jane Samaniego is the associate director of the Laura Rodriguez Research Institute (LRRI) at Family Health Centers of San Diego (FHCSD). She initially joined LRRI as a program manager leading research studies that are integrated within FHCSD clinics. Jane’s current role has her focusing on streamlining operations and implementing strategic plans to maintain organizational effectiveness across LRRI. In addition, she will be serving as the administrative coordinator from FHCSD to support the Scientist in Residency program in collaboration with SDSU HealthLINK Center.

Jane earned her B.S. in information systems from SDSU and her M.S. in health care informatics from the University of San Diego. As a certified project management professional, she holds over 10 years of experience managing projects, providing operational support, and working collaboratively across organizations on research projects. Jane is not only an alumna of SDSU but also a native South Bay San Diegan, who is committed to supporting and operationalizing meaningful research that improves the health and well-being of her community. 

Surahbi Bhutani, PhD, MS

Scientist in Residence 2026 – 2027

My research program examines how chemosensory function—particularly smell and taste—interacts with sleep and circadian patterns and the modern food environment to influence eating behavior, diet quality, obesity, and cardiometabolic risk. A central question guiding my work is why some individuals are more vulnerable than others to obesogenic food environments and why healthy dietary changes are easier to initiate and sustain for some people than for others. I focus on identifying sensory and behavioral processes that may help explain these differences, particularly under conditions of poor sleep, circadian disruption, and stress, when highly palatable foods may become especially compelling.

Many obesity and chronic disease prevention efforts focus on what people should eat, but less attention has been given to how foods are perceived, valued, and experienced in daily life. My research is grounded in the premise that smell and taste cues serve as nutritional and hedonic signals that shape how desirable and rewarding foods seem and, in turn, influence cravings, food choice, dietary adherence, and weight-related outcomes. These processes may be altered by sleep duration and timing, chronotype, stress, and the broader food environment. Poor or irregular sleep, for example, may alter taste and smell perception, heighten responses to energy-dense foods, increase cravings, and shift eating to later in the day. These changes may help explain why dietary recommendations can become more difficult to sustain when sleep is disrupted or misaligned with circadian rhythms.

I use complementary mechanistic, translational, and population-based approaches to study these relationships. In controlled settings, I examine how sleep, circadian timing, and environmental context influence sensory perception, food reward, appetite regulation, and eating behavior. In real-world settings, I investigate how habitual sleep patterns and sensory function relate to diet quality, weight, and metabolic health across diverse groups. My work is also informed by experience developing and evaluating dietary interventions for weight loss and cardiometabolic risk reduction. Together, these approaches allow me to identify and test candidate mechanisms that may explain why people respond differently to food environments and dietary interventions.

An important goal of my research is to translate these findings into feasible and scalable approaches for obesity prevention and treatment. I am particularly interested in sensory-informed strategies that use odor-based cues, taste profiles, and food choice architecture to support healthier food decisions in real-world environments. My recent work examines whether targeted odor cues or modifications to the sensory properties of foods can reduce cravings, support healthier food choices, and improve adherence to dietary recommendations. I am also interested in whether improving sleep and circadian alignment can complement sensory-informed strategies by influencing chemosensory processing and food reward. My long-term goal is to improve diet-related cardiometabolic health by integrating sensory nutrition, sleep/circadian science, and behavioral nutrition to: (1) identify sensory, sleep/circadian, and reward-related phenotypes that may increase vulnerability to unhealthy eating and obesity; and (2) develop pragmatic, scalable strategies that modify the sensory and behavioral context of eating to support healthier eating, weight management, and chronic disease prevention. These approaches may ultimately incorporate patient-reported measures, wearable-derived data, and electronic health record information and be implemented within clinical and community settings. Through this work, I aim to advance behavioral nutrition research that is mechanistically informed, clinically relevant, scalable, and responsive to the needs of populations with a high burden of diet-related chronic disease.

For the SDSU HealthLINK Center Community Engagement Core – Family Health Centers of San Diego (FHCSD) Scientist-in-Residence Program, my goals are to:

  1. Develop a collaborative research direction to adapt an existing sensory-informed dietary intervention for the FHCSD setting, with a focus on how chemosensory and sensory-reward processes may influence eating behavior, weight management, and cardiometabolic health.
  2. Understand where the intervention may best fit within relevant FHCSD programs and clinical pathways, including how patients with obesity, prediabetes, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and related cardiometabolic conditions are identified, referred, and supported across nutrition, weight-management, diabetes, and related services.
  3. Review available FHCSD electronic health record (EHR) and program data to characterize the potential target population and inform future pilot study design. This may include information on clinical outcomes, biomarkers, medications, nutrition referrals, behavioral health, social risk factors, and other factors that may influence dietary behavior or treatment engagement, such as sleep-related concerns, shift work, cravings, eating timing, food preferences, and taste/smell changes. This review will also help identify measures that may need to be collected prospectively in a future pilot study.
  4. Use insights from these collaborative discussions and data review to refine a pragmatic pilot study and guide next steps for pilot funding and collaborative research with FHCSD/LRRI.

As a result of participating in the Scientist-in-Residence program, I propose to develop the following products:

 

  1. An FHCSD-adapted sensory-informed intervention framework and focused summary identifying the target population, clinical setting, and relevant FHCSD programs and clinical pathways.
  2. An EHR and measurement feasibility summary describing available clinical and program data relevant to the potential target population, available study outcomes, and measures that may need to be collected prospectively in a future pilot study.
  3. A refined pragmatic pilot study framework specifying the intervention approach, study duration, outcomes, and feasibility measures for evaluating the adapted intervention within an FHCSD program.
  4. A pilot funding strategy and draft grant application informed by the adapted intervention, FHCSD program and EHR data, and refined pilot study design, with the goal of supporting a longer-duration feasibility study and future collaborative research with FHCSD/LRRI.

Overall, I hope to build a sustainable partnership that combines FHCSD’s clinical infrastructure and the Laura Rodriguez Research Institute (LRRI)’s expertise in pragmatic, technology-enabled research with my background in sensory nutrition, sleep/circadian science, diet interventions, and obesity research.

Amanda McClain, PhD, MS

Scientist in Residence 2025 – 2026

My research program seeks to understand the biobehavioral pathways linking food insecurity to chronic disease and to address food insecurity and limited food access as a lever for improving dietary intake and preventing and reducing poor cardiometabolic health. Specifically, I use population science (e.g., cohort data) and community-engaged research methods, including mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative data), to answer real-world/applied research questions. For example, many of my research projects are centered on understanding the day-to-day intricacies of providing a household with enough nutritious and culturally relevant food, including the food shopping and food preparation strategies that households employ to ensure food security. Understanding this lived experience informs the development of feasible interventions that make the daily food provisioning responsibilities easier, less stressful, and more sustainable over time for low-income and working-class households, while also improving their dietary quality and health. I also work closely with community-based organizations, in a scientific advisory role, to help them fulfill their mission and achieve their goal of promoting food security and health equity in their communities. My long-term research goal is to promote cardiometabolic health equity and healthy life trajectories of historically marginalized populations by using health and social science perspectives to:

  1. Understand how the stress of marginalization, especially food insecurity and food access issues, shape food choice and dietary intake and ‘get under the skin’ to impact allostatic load and cardiometabolic risk, primarily among Hispanic/Latino households, and
  1. Identify and leverage existing social, material, human, and cultural capacities (i.e., assets), as a part of multi-level, behavior-change interventions embedded in existing infrastructure (e.g., federally qualified health centers, food assistance programs), to mitigate the stress of marginalization and promote food security and healthy behaviors (nutritious diets and physical activity)

For the SDSU HealthLINK Center Community Engagement Core – Family Health Centers of San Diego Scientist-in-Residence Program, my goals are to:

  1. Better understand the clinical pathways for FHCSD patients diagnosed with prediabetes, type 2 diabetes, and hypertension.
  2. Discern the different programs offered through FHCSD to address nutrition-related behaviors and chronic disease, as well as social determinants of health.
  3. Gain knowledge and experience with FHCSD’s Electronic Health Record (EHR) system.

As a result of participating in the Scientist-in-Residence program, I propose to develop the following products:

  1. Develop concept map outlining clinical pathways and programs for patients with prediabetes, type 2 diabetes, hypertension; and programs to address SDOH (specifically food insecurity).
  2. Document of EHR components and data elements relevant to the population and research area and summarize relevant EHR data, if applicable.

Develop priority research questions and funding mechanisms for future grant applications.