My career as a medical researcher started with assessing the role of analgesics on kidney function and mortality, which culminated in a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine. After my formal training in epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health, I continued pharmacoepidemiologic research with analyses of the role of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and aspirin on cognitive function, risk for colorectal cancer (CRC), and kidney function.
As head of one of the oldest and arguably largest training program in pharmacoepidemiology in the US (and worldwide), Director of the Center for Pharmacoepidemiology, and past President of the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology, I am very glad to have been able to assemble an outstanding interdisciplinary team of researchers with expertise in epidemiology, pharmacoepidemiology, internal medicine, geriatrics, and biostatistics from within and outside of UNC to advance our methodologic armamentarium to provide valid evidence for relative benefits and harm of clinically relevant treatment alternatives in older adults. Funded by the 2nd renewal of R01 AG023178, the research team published 25 papers since 2012 (for > 8 per year) focusing on methodological developments but also applying these advanced methods to answer clinical questions of importance to older adults in the absence of alternative evidence.
I will continue to bring my training as an internist and epidemiologist, my expertise in state of the art methods for nonexperimental treatment comparisons, including comparative effectiveness research, my work as a cancer epidemiologist, my over 10 year experience in analyzing claims data and merging claims to other sources, and my expertise in propensity scores and disease risk scores to the proposed project. I will also continue to actively involve outstanding PhD students from within and outside of UNC’s pharmacoepidemiology program into my research and am happy to mentor or co-mentor students in the NextGen Training Grant.
- Submitted Abstract Session Chair – Pharmaco-Epi