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Ghassan Hamra

I am an environmental and occupational health researcher. The ultimate goal of my work is to improve population health by identifying agents that cause disease and can be removed from our environment. I am particularly interested in studying exposures as complex mixtures. This is a result of the belief that most diseases are the result of a complex process that is influenced (both negatively and positively) by a wide range of environmental contaminants, social conditions, and even products we use in day to day life.

I employ Bayesian methods to achieve my research goals. Practically speaking, the machinery of Bayesian methods (Markov chain Monte Carlo) allows a great deal of flexibility in model specification and allows us to examine exposures as mixtures in ways that traditional statistical tools are simply incapable of handling. This comes with a computational cost (some models can take days to run), but one that can be well worth it.