Public Health Research
As a Biostatistician by training, I also conduct research in public health. The goal of statistical research should be to advance knowledge not only in statistics but in substantive fields. Thus I compliment my methodological research with applied work. Much of this work still involves advanced statistical techniques, but techniques tailored to the specific question at hand.
Prevalence Estimation
With the onset of COVID-19, I began work with two epidemiologists examining advanced methods for estimating COVID prevalence while adjusting for the specificity and sensitivity of the diagnostic test. We considered a fully Bayesian model to estimate seroprevalence and are working on an extension to account for seroreversion and adjust for excess mortality. A pre-print for the latter project is forth-coming.
Policy Work
I have served as the (bio)statistician on a number of health policy related works including work examining the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on access to healthcare, the effects of financial assistance on emergency preparedness, the effectiveness of regional lab networks on health capacity, the preferences of recipients of foreign aid, and the reporting of financial conflicts amongst neurologists. Much of this work relies on my expertise in longitudinal data, ordinal data, and Bayesian and nonparametric methods. Some of this work included the development of novel approaches for handing specific problems. For example, a penalized ordinal distributed lag model or a permutation test for the Goodman-Kruskal (G-K) Gamma statistic.
Flight Health
I was the lead researcher on several projects examining the effects of exposure to altitude on heart health in older and susceptible persons. This work involved a controlled experimental setting whereby participants took part in a crossover trial and underwent exposure to simulated flight on one day and a control setting on another. In two resulting manuscripts, we show that exposure to altitude in flight negatively impacts heart rate and supraventricular and ventricular ectopy.
Other Public Health Work
My other public health related work includes work on interviewer effects on reporting to sensitive questions as well as work on care coordination in children.