I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at University of California Santa Cruz. I am broadly interested in statistical methods and tools to address scientific questions in demography, epidemiology, and global health. Currently I work on latent variable modeling in messy, high-dimensional data, space-time models, causal inference, and applications in health data science.
I was previously a postdoctoral researcher working with Forrest Crawford in the Department of Biostatistics at Yale School of Public Health. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Statistics at the University of Washington, advised by Tyler McCormick.
Kaori Fujishiro, PhD, is a Senior Research Epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). As a social epidemiologist in an agency dedicated to improving working people’s health, Kaori has done extensive research on the role work plays in creating health inequalities. Her position at NIOSH has afforded her a unique vantage point for seeing the great potential in linking population health science and occupational health science, two lines of research that so far have developed separately. Because work is governed by existing regulatory structures, research on health and health equity that focuses on work could produce directly actionable knowledge. This direction will be most fruitful if researchers examine the quality of work, not just the presence or absence of work, and interrogate how the quality of work is determined and distributed in society. Through her research, mentoring, and leadership opportunities, Kaori promotes the perspective of work as a structural determinant of health.
Kathryn is an environmental sociologist whose research examines how environmental hazards influence migration patterns, housing access, and the built environment, with a special focus on wildfires. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Sociology.
I study stratification in education and in the labor market. Some of my current work looks at the potential of school choice policies to attenuate or exacerbate patterns of inequality and segregation in urban public education systems. I am also interested in students’ nontraditional pathways to and through postsecondary education, including a focus on older adults who return to school. Additional projects examine the implications of workplace institutions and practices — including unions and policies barring workers from discussing their earnings with their colleagues — for workers’ wages.
I am an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario (in Canada). I earned my PhD in sociology from the University of Washington and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis.
Dr. Tram is an infectious diseases physician-scientist and Acting Instructor in the Department of Medicine. He conducts research on HIV and TB and practices medicine at Harborview Medical Center and UW Medical Center. He sees patients weekly at the Madison HIV Clinic at Harborview. Dr. Tram attended Stanford University medical school and completed Internal Medicine residency at Washington University in St. Louis. He then completed Infectious Diseases fellowship at the University of Washington. He is board-certified in Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases.
Dr. Tram has a dedicated focus on using the tools of epidemiology, geospatial analysis, and infectious disease modeling to optimize public health interventions, particularly for TB and HIV. He has active research collaborations in Kenya and South Africa. He has a special research interest in spatial and mobility data.
James Pfeiffer PhD, MPH, Professor in the Department of Global Health in the School of Public Health at the University of Washington, Seattle, with a joint appointment in the Department of Anthropology. Dr. Pfeiffer is the director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the Department of Global Health. He is also Executive Director of Health Alliance International (HAI), a non-profit based in Seattle affiliated with the Department of Global Health at UW, where he oversees health system strengthening projects in Mozambique, Côte d’Ivoire, and Timor Leste. Dr. Pfeiffer earned his PhD in Anthropology and his MPH at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has 30 years of research experience in implementation science, medical anthropology, and public health in Africa.
Dr. Chiyoung Lee obtained her BSN (2013) and MSN (2017) from Seoul National University. Upon graduation from the BSN program, she worked as a nurse in Emergency Department and Cardiac Intensive Care Unit at Samsung Medical Center in South Korea (2013-2017). After a master’s degree, she served as a clinical lecturer and researcher at Seoul National University College of Nursing. She came to the United States to continue her study and earned a PhD in nursing (2020) from Duke University School of Nursing.
During her academic career, Dr. Lee has been interested in conducting health disparities research for vulnerable and minority populations. Highlights from her relevant skills, experience, and studies include: a diverse set of statistical tools and analytic techniques for exploring health disparities; methodological and theoretical foundation in disparities research, particularly among older adults; and national health surveys, lifespan developmental research, systematic review, and experimental design on reporting health disparities.
Celina Balderas Guzmán, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture. Dr. Balderas’ research spans environmental planning, design, and science and focuses on climate adaptation to sea level rise on the coast and urban stormwater inland. On the coast, her work demonstrates specific ways that the climate adaptation actions of humans and adaptation of ecosystems are interdependent. Her work explores how these interdependencies can be maladaptive by shifting vulnerabilities to other humans or non-humans, or synergistic. Using ecological modeling, she has explored these interdependencies focusing on coastal wetlands as nature-based solutions. Her work informs cross-sectoral adaptation planning at a regional scale.
Inland, Dr. Balderas studies urban stormwater through a social-ecological lens. Using data science and case studies, her work investigates the relationship between stormwater pollution and the social, urban form, and land cover characteristics of watersheds. In past research, she developed new typologies of stormwater wetlands based on lab testing in collaboration with environmental engineers. The designs closely integrated hydraulic performance, ecological potential, and recreational opportunities into one form.
Her research has been funded by major institutions such as the National Science Foundation, National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, UC Berkeley, and the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab. She has a PhD in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning from the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, she obtained masters degrees in urban planning and urban design, as well as an undergraduate degree in architecture all from MIT.
David Huh is a quantitative and clinical psychologist whose research focuses on advancing quantitative methodology in behavioral health intervention and health disparities research. His areas of research include alcohol use, chronic illness, suicide prevention, and culturally informed intervention with American Indian and Alaska Native communities and other underserved populations. An overarching goal of Dr. Huh’s research is making cutting-edge statistical methodology capable of more accurately evaluating health and social behavioral data more accessible to substantive researchers and non-statisticians.
Dr. Huh is presently the Director of the Methods Division at the University of Washington (UW) Indigenous Wellness Institute and a Licensed Psychologist in the State of Washington. He received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the UW in 2012 and completed his psychology residency at the UW School of Medicine and his postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for the Study of Health and Risk Behaviors.
Dr. Huh’s recent research has focused on identifying the features of effective interventions for reducing problem alcohol use, particularly time-limited approaches appropriate for resource-limited settings. Towards that end, he is currently developing new statistical approaches for meta-analysis using individual participant data that can evaluate treatment effectiveness and pathways of change with greater accuracy than either traditional meta-analysis or single-study designs.
A key emphasis of Dr. Huh’s program of research is increasing the accessibility of statistical approaches that can more powerfully and accurately assess behavioral health interventions and test theoretical models of health and health disparities.
Dr. Rao is a Professor and Director at the Laboratory for Theory and Mathematical Modeling, Medical College of Georgia, Augusta University. Until 2012, he held a permanent faculty position at Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. He had taught and/or performed research at several premier institutions including, the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), University of Oxford (Oxford, UK), the Indian Institute of Science (Bengaluru, India), Hiroshima University (Japan), and the University of Guelph, (Guelph, Canada) prior to his arrival at Augusta University.
Dr. Rao developed the first AI model in the world for the identification of COVID-19 through apps. His recent works on partition theorem in populations, Chicken-walk models, Rao’s Partition Theorem in Populations, and Rao-Carey Fundamental Theorem in stationary populations, Multilevel Contours, and Bundles of Complex Planes are well received. His recent EDLM (Exact Deep Learning Machines) are anticipated as a game changer in AI related experiments.