Member Insight: Brenda Heaton
What sparked your decision to become an epidemiologist? As part of my undergraduate degree requirements in Health Sciences, I took an introductory course in epidemiology. I liked the course generally, but it was when I was preparing my class presentation on the topic of misclassification that I felt the sparks start to fly. Continued research experiences fanned the flame, and the fire was blazing after taking Tim Lash’s ‘Modern Epidemiology’ course, TA’d by Matt Fox, during my MPH degree at Boston University. What do you see as the biggest obstacle facing epidemiologists in the next five years? With an increasing ability to generate and harness data that can improve our understanding of population health comes the question of how we train epidemiologists to navigate this rapidly changing landscape. We need to think carefully about how we train epidemiologists so that they can nimbly apply core epidemiological principles across a wide variety of problem domains, effectively evaluate emerging approaches to data generation, skillfully assess an expanding set of tools and methodologies available to analyze data, and productively collaborate with data and other computational scientists. Do you have any pets? I have three adorable children (3, 6, and 8 years old). 😊 […]