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Past Award Winners – Tyroler Student

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2023 Tyroler Student Prize Paper Award Winner

Emma Herbach is an Assistant Scientist at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Office of Community Outreach and Engagement and Postdoctoral Scholar in the Cancer Control Training in Disparities and Equity program at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. She completed her PhD in Epidemiology at the University of Iowa in 2022. She earned a master’s degree in biostatistics in 2018 and bachelor’s degree in statistics and psychology in 2017 from Florida State University.

2022 Tyroler Student Prize Paper Award Winner Julie Petersen

Julie M. Petersen received her PhD in Epidemiology from the Boston University School of Public Health in 2021 and is currently a postdoctoral associate at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. Her research aims to inform clinical guidelines for pregnancy (e.g., birth spacing, diet and vitamin supplementation, weight gain) to prevent adverse pregnancy outcomes like congenital malformations, fetal growth restriction, and preterm birth. Her methodological interests include the relative benefit of novel methodologies, such as machine learning, versus conventional analytic approaches and bias analysis to account for sources of systematic error.

2021 Tyroler Student Prize Paper Award Winner
Fausto Bustos, University of California, Berkeley

I’m an ORISE Data Science Fellow collaborating with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. I provide data analytic expertise, computational and statistical assistance, and substantive scientific knowledge to various NIAID divisions in furtherance of their research missions. In addition, I am an award-winning infectious disease epidemiologist specializing in COVID-19, Zika, chikungunya, and dengue. Since 2015, I have conducted epidemiological, clinical, and spatial research on epidemics of these viral diseases in Managua, Nicaragua. When not watching science fiction or cooking-centric reality TV shows, you’ll find me immersed in a good stats book and eating key lime pie.

2020 Tyroler Student Prize Paper Award Winner
Michael Webster-Clark, UNC Chapel Hill

Michael Webster-Clark is currently a post-doctoral research associate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After receiving his Doctor of Pharmacy degree from Northeastern University, his interest in comparative effectiveness research and the external validity of randomized trials prompted him to seek a PhD at UNC. His current research areas include propensity scores, transportability and generalizability of randomized trials, and pharmacoepidemiology methods.

2019 Tyroler Student Prize Paper Award Winner
Brittany Blouin, McGill University

Brittany Blouin completed her PhD in Epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health at McGill University in November 2018. Her research focuses on global health and epidemiologic methods with particular interest in infectious and parasitic diseases, child health and nutrition, and field research. She has approximately ten years of experience working and living in Peru, where her PhD research was conducted. She is currently a consultant on a joint project between UNAIDS and McGill University and a Senior Advisor for the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research and Training in Parasite Epidemiology and Control.

2018 Tyroler Student Prize Paper Award Winner
Michael Harhay, University of Pennsylvania

Michael Harhay is a NHLBI K99/R00 pathway to independence trainee at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also completed his PhD in epidemiology and MS in statistics in 2016 as a NHLBI F31 predoctoral fellow. Michael primarily pursues collaborative and methodological research in clinical trial design, critical care medicine, and transplantation.

2017 Tyroler Student Prize Paper Award Winner
Ellicott Matthay, UC Berkeley

Ellicott Matthay is a PhD Candidate in Epidemiology at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. She received dual bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics and Community Health from Tufts University and an MPH in Global Health Metrics and Evaluation from the University of Washington. Her current research focuses on the causes and consequences of community violence, with specific attention to contextual determinants of self-harm and the evaluation of violence-related policies and programs in California. She is invested in novel epidemiologic and biostatistical methods, and in generating actionable evidence that assists high-level decision-makers to shift the major determinants of population health.

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2016 Tyroler Student Prize Paper Award Winner
Neal Goldstein, Drexel

Neal D. Goldstein, PhD, MBI is an infectious disease epidemiologist currently working as a postdoctoral fellow at Christiana Care Health System (Newark, DE). His research spans several disciplines including vaccine-preventable diseases, sexual minority health, pediatric infectious diseases, and women’s health surrounding pregnancy. He also possesses a background in biomedical informatics with detailed knowledge of hardware and software in the healthcare domain. Most recently, he has focused on translational epidemiology, or moving from knowledge generation to application and advocacy. He writes a science blog, which is available at www.goldsteinepi.com/blog, and can be followed on Twitter (@goldsteinepi).

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2015 Tyroler Student Prize Paper Award Winner
Hailey Banack

Hailey Banack is a fourth year doctoral student in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. Her thesis supervisor is Dr. Jay Kaufman. Hailey’s dissertation research is focused on conceptual and methodological issues related to the study of obesity, cardiovascular disease and mortality. She is specifically interested in examining the “obesity paradox” and methods for addressing selection bias in epidemiologic research.  

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2014 Tyroler Lilienfeld Prize Paper Award Winner
Samantha Parker, MSPH
Boston University School of Public Health

Samantha Parker received her doctorate in epidemiology from Boston University School of Public Health in 2014, where she was a pre-doctoral fellow on Boston University’s reproductive, perinatal, and pediatric training grant. Her dissertation work focused on reproductive history and the risk of preeclampsia. She currently works at the Slone Epidemiology Center at Boston University on case-control studies of risk factors for birth defects and a follow-up study of prenatal exposures and childhood neurodevelopment.