Kenneth Rothman Travel Scholarship Winners
Deirdre Tobias
Dr. Deirdre Tobias, ScD is an obesity epidemiologist and Instructor at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health in Boston, MA. Dr. Tobias received her doctorate in nutrition epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health. Her primary research interests include identifying the lifestyle risk factors for prevention of obesity-related chronic diseases, including diabetes and cancer. She recently completed a NIH K01 award to investigate the metabolomics predicting progression from gestational diabetes to type 2 diabetes. Dr. Tobias’ research has been published in leading scientific journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, and loves reading and singing with her two lively children, Eva 3 and Camden 4.5.
Kara Bensley -
Kara Bensley is a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington in the Department of Health Services. She received an M.Sc. in Medical Anthropology in 2011 from University College London, and a B.S. from Michigan State University in 2009. She has research interests in mental health and substance use treatment, harm reduction among vulnerable populations, and promoting health equity in racial/ethnic minorities and rural populations. She has applied these interests to research on equitable access to alcohol treatment among vulnerable populations of veterans and on the association between mental illness and unhealthy alcohol use among military personnel. Her dissertation examines differences in alcohol use, care, and outcomes across race/ethnicity and rurality among patients living with HIV who receive care in the Veterans Health Administration.
Giehae Choi -
Giehae is a PhD student in the Department of Epidemiology at UNC. She received her MPH and BHS in environmental health from Korea University. Her research interests stem from a goal to reduce environmental health burden via epidemiologic research. Investigating the causal relation of environmental pollution to adverse health effects is her primary area of interest. Her larger study goal is in investigating epidemiologic research methods to facilitate translation of research into practice.
Student and PostDoc Travel Scholarship Winners
Erin Schnellinger
Harry Zhuang
Liheng (Harry) Zhuang is a doctoral student in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University . He received a MPH in environmental and occupational health from Simon Fraser University in 2017 and a B.Sc. in Biochemistry from University of British Columbia in 2013. He is interested in research pertaining to modern statistical applications in the field of environmental epidemiology. In particular, his dissertation will develop and examine multiple statistical methods in estimation of the relationship between environmental chemical exposures and pregnancy outcomes.
Emilie Leveque
I am a PhD student at INSERM U1219 Bordeaux Population Health in France, working in both Epidemiology of Cancer and Environmental Exposures team and Biostatistics team. My research consists in the evaluation of statistical models to assess the impact of protracted environmental/occupational exposures on the risk of cancer. In particular, I have interest in modeling exposure history. It aims at including the temporal aspect of the protracted exposures in the assessment of risk of cancer. My work is based on three dose-time-response relationships: occupational asbestos exposure-pleural mesothelioma, smoking exposure-lung cancer, occupational asbestos exposure-lung cancer. With this work, we want to stress the importance of considering timing of exposure in its association with cancer risk. I have major interest in staying close to the epidemiological reality in order to propose appropriate statistical models that answer to real epidemiological questions.
Katsiayrna Bykov
Katsiaryna Bykov, PharmD, MS, is currently completing her doctoral degree in Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She received her PharmD degree from Temple University School of Pharmacy in 2010 and her Master’s degree in Epidemiology from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2011. After working as a research scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston for a few years, she decided to pursue a doctoral degree and, ultimately, a career of an independent researcher. Her thesis work is focused on developing methods for evaluating the clinical impact of drug-drug interactions in electronic healthcare databases.
Melissa Soohoo
I am currently a first year doctoral student at the Department of Epidemiology, Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) under Dr. Onyebuchi Arah. After earning my MPH from the University of California, Irvine, I have worked in clinical epidemiology in the field of chronic kidney disease and getting experience in several facets of epidemiology methods. Through this research, I have started to work in advanced causal and statistical methods, with an interest in continuing to pursue training in this area.
Abdool Yasseen
Abdool is a clinical investigator based at the Children`s Hospital of Eastern Ontario – Research Institute, with expertise in paediatric and perinatal epidemiology. He conducts surveillance research on a multitude of infectious diseases (TB, HIV, and Hepatitis) using large health administrative data and investigates health-equity among marginalised and foreign-born populations. Abdool earned a Masters degree in Theoretical and Evolutionary Ecology from the Department of Biology and School of Math and Stats, Carleton University, and a Graduate Diploma in Population Health Risk Assessment and Management from the Institution of Population Health, University of Ottawa. Since graduating he worked as a senior research methodologist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute and is currently pursuing a PhD Epidemiology and Public Health Policy at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. For his dissertation, he uses machine learning approaches and statistical data mining techniques to examine downstream population health effect of viral hepatitis among migrant communities in Canada.
Karena Volesky
Karena is an epidemiology PhD student at McGill University in Montréal where her research examines the impact of infections on cancer incidence. Before pursuing her PhD, she researched e-cigarettes, blood donation, and pharmaceutical policy. Her education background is in public policy, and she has an MA in public administration and an MSc in health: science, technology and policy.
Meliha Salahuddin -
Meliha Salahuddin joined the Texas Collaborative for Healthy Mothers and Babies with Population Health Department of University of Texas System in Spring of 2017 as a post-doctoral research fellow. She earned her PhD in Epidemiology from UTHealth School of Public Health-Austin in 2016. Her research interests focus on understanding risk factors of chronic diseases and maternal and child health.
Eva Tanner -
Eva is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the University at Albany, School of Public Health. Her dissertation research explores the effect of polychlorinated biphenyls on cognitive decline in the elderly using a comparative statistical treatment of chemical exposure to challenge the concentration-addition paradigm. More broadly, her research interests include methodological developments to minimize bias when assessing health effects in the presence of left-censored laboratory data and complex chemical mixtures.