Distinguished Service to SER Award Sherman James
Sherman A. James is the Susan B. King Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University. He also held secondary professorships, at Duke, in Sociology, Community and Family Medicine, and African and African American Studies. Prior to Duke, he taught in the epidemiology departments at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (1973-89) and at the University of Michigan (1989-03). At Michigan, he was the John P. Kirscht Collegiate Professor of Public Health, the Founding Director of the Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture and Health (CRECH), Chair of the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education, and a Senior Research Scientist in the Survey Research Center at the Institute for Social Research. Read more
Kenneth Rothman Career Accomplishment Award Sean Hennessy, University of Pennsylvania
Sean Hennessy leads the University of Pennsylvania’s Division of Epidemiology and its Center for Real-world Effectiveness and Safety of Therapeutics (CREST). His research evaluates the real-world effectiveness and safety of prescription drugs using healthcare data. His research program studies serious health consequences of drug-drug interactions involving high-risk drugs including anticoagulants, treatments for diabetes, and medications used for opioid use disorder, and is widely cited in clinical compendia of drug-drug interactions. He and his colleagues identified a survival benefit of potassium supplements in users of loop diuretics, and found that this survival benefit increases with hotter outdoor temperatures. Read more
Sherman James Diverse & Inclusive Award Brittany Charlton, Harvard University
Dr. Brittany Charlton is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute in the Department of Population Medicine and at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in the Department of Epidemiology. The focus of Dr. Charlton’s research is on health inequities among sexual and gender minorities, particularly related to reproductive health and cancer. The second focal area of her research is contraception use and family planning among people of all sexual orientations and gender identities. Her research has sustained continuous funding for the last decade from the NIH and foundations, including the American Cancer Society. She has been the Principal Investigator on 18 grants, including her most recent NIH-funded R01 award, focused on sexual orientation-related disparities in obstetrical and perinatal health. Additionally, she collaborates with colleagues across the globe on a host of large-scale studies. Dr. Charlton has published over 75 original research papers including in JAMA, BMJ, and the American Journal of Public Health.
Tom Koepsell & Noel Weiss Excellence in Education Award WayWay Hlaing, University of Miami
WayWay M. Hlaing, MBBS, MS, PhD, FACE, is a Professor of epidemiology in the division of Epidemiology and Population Health Sciences in the Department of Public Health Sciences (DPHS) at the Miller School of Medicine (MSOM) with appointment as a faculty affiliate in the Institute for Bioethics and Health Policy.
Dr. Hlaing is an educator, researcher, mentor and the Director of the PhD in Epidemiology program in the DPHS. She currently teaches core epidemiology courses to master’s (MPH/MSPH/MS in Biostatistics and MS in Clinical and Translational Sciences), and doctoral students. She also mentors and leads PhD and MD-PhD students on research, and epidemiology journal club related activities.
Trained as a chronic disease epidemiologist, she has served as an investigator or a methodologist on numerous federal and foundation funded studies relating to cardiovascular disease, obesity, HIV/AIDS, and substance abuse. The central theme of her research is the intersection between chronic conditions, risk factors and health disparities.Read more
Marshall Joffe Methods Award Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen, University of Pennsylvania
As University Professor, Dr. Tchetgen Tchetgen holds joint primary appointments in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at The Wharton School and in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics at the Perelman School of Medicine. He received his BS in Applied Mathematics from Yale University in 1999 and his PhD in Statistics from Harvard University in 2006. After serving on the faculty of the Harvard School of Public Health for ten years, he joined The Wharton School in 2018 as the Luddy Family President’s Distinguished Professor and Professor of Statistics and Data Science.
Dr. Tchetgen Tchetgen is a world leader in the field of causal inference. In recognition of his ground-breaking research, he was a co-recipient of the 2022 Rousseeuw Prize awarded to Causal Inference for pioneering research on causal inference with real-world applications in medicine and public health. He is co-director of the Center for Causal Inference at Penn.
Roger Detels Infectious Disease Award William Schaffner, Vanderbilt University
William Schaffner, MD
Dr. William Schaffner is Professor of Preventive Medicine in the Department of Health Policy and Professor of Infectious Diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.
After graduating from Yale in 1957, Schaffner attended the University of Freiburg, Germany as a Fulbright Scholar. He graduated from Cornell University Medical College in 1962 and completed residency training and a Fellowship in Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt. Read more
Carol Hogue Mid-Career Award Jaimie Gradus, Boston University
Jaimie L. Gradus, DMSc, DSc, MPH is a Professor of Epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health and Psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine. Her research interests are in the epidemiology of stress and trauma, psychiatric disorders, and suicide. Dr. Gradus has led and been a part of teams that have received numerous grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Defense, and various foundations, which in total have generated over $25 million in grant funding. She has published over 130 scientific articles within the field of psychiatric epidemiology. Read more
Brian MacMahon Early Career Award Jacquelyn Cragg, University of British Columbia
Dr. Cragg is a data scientist and Assistant Professor in in the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences at UBC. She completed MPH and PhD degrees in epidemiology and biostatistics from the UBC School of Population and Public Health.
She also completed post-doctoral fellowships with the Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health and International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries (ICORD).
Her current research aims to identify causes, risk factors, and biomarkers of neurological disease progression, including Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injury, and stroke.
At the core of her work is a series of prospective and retrospective investigations that integrate genetic, biochemical, clinical assessments, and medication history with both traditional epidemiological approaches and machine-learning algorithms. Her work using advanced analytical techniques has applications in modelling disease progression, drug safety, and drug repurposing.
Lilienfeld Postdoctoral Prize Paper Award Paul Zivich, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill “Transportability without positivity: a synthesis of statistical and simulation modeling”
Paul is an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His interests are in causal inference with potential outcomes and computational aspects of epidemiology. Dr. Zivich’s work has ranged from assessing the performance of estimators through simulation studies to free and open source software (FOSS) to collection of contact network data with electronic sensors to application of causal inference in the context of infectious disease and social epidemiology. His current work focuses on improving HIV research methods and addressing positivity violations.
Finalists
Asma Ahmed, Wake Forest University
“Preterm birth, family income, and intergenerational income mobility”
Eleanor Hayes-Larson, University of California at Los Angeles
“Transport estimators for observational data: challenges, solutions, and open questions”
Amber Hall, Brown University
“Associations of a Prenatal Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substance Mixture with the Cord Serum Metabolome in the HOME Study”
Tyroler Student Prize Paper Award Julia Bond, Boston University “Female sexual function and distress and time-to-pregnancy in a prospective preconception.”
Julia Bond received her PhD in Epidemiology from Boston University School of Public Health in 2024. Her dissertation research, supported by an F31 grant from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, evaluated preconception risk factors for adverse reproductive health outcomes. She is interested in incorporating sex-positive outcomes including pleasure and satisfaction into the epidemiologic study of sexual health. She obtained an MPH in Epidemiology from the University of Washington and a BA in Neuroscience from Bowdoin College.
Finalists
Rime Jebai, Boston University
“Effects of Pictorial Health Warning Labels on Intention to Quit Waterpipe in Lebanon: A mediation Analysis”
Elizabeth Williams, University of Montana
“A retrospective cohort study on the association between ambient air pollution and hypertensive disorders of pregnancy in a rural state.”
Guoyi Yang, Hong Kong University
“Illustrating the structures of bias from immortal time using directed acyclic graphs.”
Emma Kileel, Boston University
“Understanding the role of measurement error in regression discontinuity for epidemiologic research.”
Yohane Vincent Abero Phiri, University of Buffalo
“Early-life living environment, parental mental health, gender differences and allergic diseases among children under-five years in the Greater Taipei Area”
Susser - Stein Award Winners
Marcus Ferreira
Ayse Ulgen
Juan Manuel Mejia Arangure
Tendai Gwanzura