Kenneth Rothman Travel Scholarship Winners
Leslie Farland
Dr. Leslie V. Farland is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona. She has training in biology (AB; University of Chicago) and reproductive epidemiology (MSc, ScD; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health). Her research focuses on women’s reproductive and gynecologic health and can be broadly categorized into three major themes: i) the intersection between reproductive health and chronic disease, ii) the etiology of infertility, endometriosis, and polycystic ovary syndrome, and iii) disparities in access to infertility care.
Marynia Kolak
Marynia Kolak, MS, MFA, PhD, is a Social Determinants of Health geographer using open science tools and an exploratory data analytic approach to investigate issues of equity across space and time. Her research centers on how “place” impacts health outcomes in different ways, for different people, from opioid risk environments to chronic disease clusters. She is the Assistant Director of Health Informatics and Lecturer in GIScience at the Center for Spatial Data Science, University of Chicago, and serves as a Public Service Intern at the Chicago Department of Public Health. She received her Ph.D in Geography at ASU, M.F.A in Writing from Roosevelt University, M.S. in GIS from John Hopkins University, and B.S. in Geology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Wei-Chen Lee
Dr. Lee is a Health Disparities Analyst at University of Texas Medical Branch. She completed her Ph.D. in Health Services Research (HSR) at Texas A&M Health Science Center. Her research interests lie in the area of rural health, ranging from discovering disparities in health outcomes to promoting workforce development. She is also a state-certified Community Health Worker (CHW) and CHW Instructor. She was honored to be the 2018 National Rural Health Fellow and currently, she serves as the editor for the Journal of Rural Health (JRH) as well as the advisory committee member for the Research Subgroup of Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). Both doing research and serving in communities allow her to better understand the health issues and make a profound contribution to eliminating health disparities.
Student and PostDoc Travel Scholarship Winners
Malcolm Barrett
Malcolm Barrett is a PhD candidate in Epidemiology at the University of Southern California. His areas of research include eye and vision epidemiology, cancer symptom epidemiology, and psychometrics related to quality of life. He is an avid R user and teaches R to students and faculty of the Preventive Medicine department at USC, co-organizes the Los Angeles East R Users Group, develops R packages, and regularly contributes to popular R packages. His R packages include ggdag, a tool for visualizing and analyzing causal directed acyclic graphs, and precisely, a sample size planning tool that targets precision rather than power.
Iris Cervenka
Iris Cervenka is a third-year PhD student at the French university of Paris Saclay. She explores associations between exogenous hormone use and melanoma risk, in a large prospective cohort of French women. During her PhD, Iris also monitors graduate courses in Epidemiology and R software. Before joining epidemiology, her background was in environmental sciences and policy. As a member of the doctoral network of EHESP, she nurtures great interest for environmental health.
Tiffany Fitzpatrick
Tiffany Fitzpatrick, MPH HBSc, is a 3rd-year PhD Candidate in Epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health (DLSPH), University of Toronto and a trainee of the Hospital for Sick Children, Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES), DLSPH Public Health Policy Collaborative Program, and Canadian Immunization Research Network (CIRN). Under the supervision of Drs. David Fisman and Astrid Guttmann, Tiffany’s dissertation is investigating various demographic, socioeconomic and clinical risk factors for severe respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) illness among infants in Ontario, with a specific focus on evaluating Ontario’s current RSV Prophylaxis for High-Risk Infants Program and developing a mathematical transmission model to lay the groundwork for future evaluations of emerging RSV vaccines.
Kosuke Inoue
Kosuke Inoue is currently a PhD student in the Department of Epidemiology at UCLA Fielding school of Public Health. He received his MD from the University of Tokyo, Japan in 2013. Before he came to UCLA, he worked as an endocrinologist and performed several works about hypertension (mainly related to steroid genesis), diabetes, and thyroid dysfunction. His current research focuses on causal inference in chronic diseases, especially investigating long-term outcomes of such diseases and how genetic information relates to them. (Publication Lists: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/bibliography/1F3yxyfdqHH5j/bibliography/public/)
Holly Jessop
I have always had a passion for science, with interests that have gradually evolved towards more applied pursuits that relate to human health. I am currently working in epidemiology and public health, with the career aim of becoming a leader in healthcare epidemiology and the prevention of healthcare-associated infections (HAI). This career path is the result of graduate training in biology, ecology & environmental sciences, and epidemiology, as well as having been a healthcare epidemiologist with the California Department of Public Health’s HAI Program over the past four years. Read more
Ang Li
Ang is a first-year Nutritional and Genetic Epidemiology PhD student at Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. He previously received his MPH at Yale, majoring in Chronic Disease Epidemiology, with two concentrations: Regulatory Affairs and Public Health Modeling. He is passionate about precision nutrition and gene-diet interaction, particularly in the maternal-childhood interface. He previously received Weinerman Summer Intern Fellowship, where he led methodological design at European Union to estimate drug induced mortality and drug related mortality among drug users for the first time in Cyprus. He is also a research assistant at Harvard University focusing on the impacts of nutrition exposure and lifestyle by combining Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-up Study. He was awarded with Gaetano Bazzano, MD, PhD Scholarship for 2018-2019 academic year at Tulane University. Now, he has participated in many clinical trials and prepared one manuscript about the relationship between vitamin D and miscarriage as the first author.
Buyun Liu
Buyun Liu is a postdoc research scholar in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Iowa. Her research interest focuses on nutritional epidemiology, environmental epidemiology, and maternal and child health. Her current work, funded by the NIH/NIEHS through the University of Iowa Environmental Health Sciences Research Center, is examining the association of maternal exposure to bisphenol A substitutes with pregnancy complications and birth outcomes.
Maya Luetke
Maya Luetke, MSPH, is a doctoral student in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Indiana University School of Public Health Bloomington. Her research focuses on economic disparities, gender-based violence, and infectious disease outcomes. She is interested in preventing violence and the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases especially in vulnerable populations and communities.
Mitra Mosslemi
Mitra Mosslemi is currently completing her master’s degree in epidemiology at UC Irvine. Her thesis work is focused on comparing cardiometabolic risk factors between type 1 and type 2 diabetes using National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Her research interests include investigating the causal relations among cardiometabolic risk factors, exploring gender differences in the interactions between cardiometabolic factors, and identifying markers for assessing the cardiometabolic health status at subclinical level. Her long-term goal is to develop a career in research as a chronic disease epidemiologist with a focus on diabetes and preventing diabetes-related complications.
Jennifer Seamans
Jennifer Seamans, MST, is an MPH Epidemiology student at the Oregon Health & Science University-Portland State University (OHSU-PSU) School of Public Health, with interests that include the influences of structural inequalities on life course and intergenerational health, and implications for public health practice and policy. She is currently completing supervised research on racial differences in the association between maternal early life adversity and asthma in children. As a research assistant in the Oregon Prevention Research Center (PRC), she also supports evaluation and dissemination of a culturally appropriate sexual health curriculum for AI/AN teens. Prior to pursuing the MPH, Jen earned a MST in science learning and assessment, and worked for over a decade managing community-centered watershed health projects.
Surim Son
I am a Master’s student in Applied Health Science, specializing in Epidemiology and Biostatistics, at Brock University. My research interests focus on linking mental health, metabolic syndrome and chronic disorders. I teach SAS program in Biostatistics classes.
Samuel Swift
Samuel L. Swift is a social epidemiologist, defending his dissertation in March 2019 at the University of Miami. His interests are the social determinants of substance misuse and chronic disease, with an emphasis on epidemiological methods. His dissertation focuses on associations between racial discrimination in medical settings, the great recession, and depression and substance misuse. Sam comes to Miami by way of his hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he is returning to continue his research in 2019. His doctoral mentor, Adina Zeki Al Hazzouri, PhD is a long time SER member and contributor. Dr. Zeki Al Hazzouri is currently at the University of Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, where she focuses on social epidemiology and aging research.