The mission of the SER-Student & Post-Doc Committee (SER-SPC) is to facilitate the educational experiences and professional development of students in epidemiology-related disciplines by providing information, resources, and networking opportunities; facilitating student exchange of research ideas; and providing service to the SER and advancing and promoting the SER-SPC.
Lindsay Pool
President
Lindsay is a social epidemiologist who studies the association between economic status and health (and the research methods necessary to study an often bidirectional association). She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine as part of a cardiovascular disease disparities research network. She has a PhD in epidemiology from the University of Michigan, an MPH in epidemiology from Emory University and a BS in social policy from Northwestern University, and has worked previously at the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Contact
Northwestern University
Feinberg School of Medicine
lindsay.pool@northwestern.edu
David Fink
Past President
David Fink, MPH is interested in the influence of social arrangements and interactions on population health. He is a social epidemiologist who has worked extensively with various branches of the military (i.e., US Army, Navy, Marine Corp, National Guard and Reserves) to investigate the psychological sequela of combat using a life course perspective. His primary focus is on (i) the etiology of mental disorders, particularly substance use disorders; (ii) the extension of quantitative methods to estimate the health effects of policies and programs with a goal of (iii) improving population health through evidence-based policy. He has published 30 articles, half of which were first-authored, and 3 book chapters. He is currently a PhD candidate in Epidemiology at Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in the NIDA-funded substance abuse training program.
Contact
Columbia University
Mailman School of Public Health
dsf2130@columbia.edu
@DavidSFink
Yeyi Zhu
President-Elect
Yeyi Zhu, PhD, MS is an Epidemiologist at the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research. She obtained her postdoctoral training on nutritional and environmental epidemiology at Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). Her research interests are at the interface of disease etiology and prevention strategies in the arena of women’s and children’s health across the lifespan. She has also conducted collaborative investigations in the associations of air pollution and endocrine disrupting chemicals with adverse pregnancy and birth outcomes in the NIH Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) program.
Contact
Kaiser Permanente Northern California
Division of Research
yeyi.zhu@kp.org
Sylvia Badon
Education Chair
Sylvia is a postdoctoral fellow in the Women and Children’s Health section at the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research. Her research focuses on maternal lifestyle before and during pregnancy, including physical activity and sedentary behavior, and its associations with various maternal and child health outcomes using several birth cohorts in the United States and abroad. She received a PhD in epidemiology at the University of Washington, a MS in epidemiology and biostatistics from Northwestern University, and an AB in biology from the University of Chicago.
Contact
Kaiser Permanente Northern California
Division of Research
sylvia.e.badon@kp.org
Seth Kuranz
Internal Affairs Chair
Seth is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Epidemiology at the Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH). He received an MPH from BUSPH in 2012 and a BA in anthropology from Arizona State University. His research interests include the influence of neighborhood, school, and family environments on substance abuse outcomes and differences between sexual minority and heterosexual young adults.
Contact
Boston University
skuranz@bu.edu
Tamala Gondwe
Media Chair
Tamala is a postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Epidemiology at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine. She completed her doctoral training in Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, and prior to that obtained an MPH in Epidemiology from Tulane School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine, and a BSc in Community Health at the University of Maryland- College Park. Her research interests are in the area of Maternal and Child Health Epidemiology, with a current focus on racial disparities in perinatal and postpartum adverse maternal outcomes.
Contact
Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine
tgondwe@vcu.edu
@_TamalaGondwe_
Chenan Zhang
Program Co-Chair
Chenan Zhang is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. Before that, she completed her PhD in Epidemiology at the University of Chicago’s Department of Public Health Sciences, an MS in Marine Science from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BS in Biochemistry and Zoology from the University of Florida. Her dissertation work focused on the role of telomere length as a prospective biomarker of cancer risk, and her current research involves two topics in genetic epidemiology of cancer: genetic variants associated with active surveillance failure for prostate cancer, and telomere length-related genetic susceptibility to pediatric glioma.
Contact
University of California, San Francisco
Chenan.Zhang@ucsf.edu
John Pamplin
Program Co-Chair
John Pamplin is a pre-doctoral fellow in the Psychiatric Epidemiology Training program and is a current doctoral candidate in the Department of Epidemiology at the Columbia University, Mailman School of Public Health, where he previously earned his MPH. John’s research interests lie at the nexus of social epidemiology and psychiatric epidemiology; he is interested in the mental health consequences of societal structures in the U.S., with a primary focus on the relationship between structural racism and mental health among people of color.
Contact
Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health
jrp2166@cumc.columbia.edu