Laura Vandiver is the Managing Director and practice leader for health communications and market research at Lambert. Getting the message right takes a thoughtful, strategic approach, and requires authenticity and transparency. As a trained medical anthropologist, communications professional, Certified Health Education Specialist (CHES), and National Board-Certified Health & Wellness Coach (NBC-HWC), Laura excels at finding ways to connect with audiences in meaningful ways. Laura is passionate about researching and executing health communications campaigns, using her behavioral science background to better understand health behaviors, and let that guide the messaging.
For the past twelve years, she’s built her career as an award-winning communications leader, content strategist and market research professional at Lambert, with a specialty in public health communications and campaigns. For many years, Laura conducted HIV-specific work in the public health and epidemiology fields. She worked in harm reduction and prevention at Denver’s Harm Reduction Action Center and Denver Public Health. During this time, she outreached to marginalized populations (unhoused, injection drug users) and taught HIV and Hepatitis C awareness and prevention classes to the community. She is skilled in qualitative and quantitative research methods, communicating to diverse audiences, survey design and development, focus group facilitation, communication strategy, and finding messages that resonate with targeted audiences. She has conducted research studies and developed strategic communication recommendations for a variety of organizations including state and local health departments, Fortune 500 pharmacy benefit managers, state conservation departments, international lottery solutions providers, regional library systems, nonprofits, universities, and national public health organizations. Throughout her career she has led and facilitated dozens of focus groups, executive interviews, training seminars, university classes, strategy sessions, board meetings, and more. She is an expert at establishing trust within groups and with individuals and partnering with them to gather insights that help her clients succeed.
Laura provides executive counsel to a variety of clients. In addition, in her research and health communications work, she’s an accomplished content strategist, helping to create, plan, or edit a wide variety of assets for clients.
Laura has a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Iowa, and a master’s degree in medical anthropology from the University of Missouri-Columbia.