Epidemiology and Biostatistics

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(301) 405-8037

Olivia Carter-Pokras, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of Maryland College Park School of Public Health. She has been recognized by the Surgeon General, Assistant Secretary for Health and Latino Caucus of the American Public Health Association for her career achievements to improve racial and ethnic data and develop national health policy to address health disparities. Her research has played a critical role in national recognition of health disparities experienced by Latin American immigrants. Dr. Carter-Pokras is the Principal Investigator for a NHLBI cultural competency and health disparities academic award, a state tobacco disparities evaluation contract, and a community based participatory research grant from NICHD on oral health of Latino and Ethiopian children and their mothers. She conducts health assessments of Latinos in Baltimore and Montgomery County in close partnership with local government and community based organizations. Dr. Carter-Pokras is a member of the Board of Directors for the American College of Epidemiology, and the Executive Board of the American Public Health Association.

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Epidemiology and Biostatistics

(301) 405-2551

Xin He, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of Maryland, College Park.

Dr. He's current research focuses on longitudinal data analysis, survival analysis, nonparametric and semiparametric methods, as well as applications in clinical trials, epidemiology, and other public health related studies.

Epidemiology and Biostatistics

(301) 405-6521

Dr. Khan researches the social and structural determinants of sexual risk behavior, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and HIV in domestic and international settings.

Her recent work has focused on investigating STI/HIV among those with a history of incarceration, their sex partners, and other members of their sexual networks. She was recently funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse to evaluate the longitudinal relationship between substance use in adolescence and STI in adulthood, including the degree to which substance use influences STI by increasing risk of involvement in the criminal justice system.

Dr. Khan also has substantial field experience conducting epidemiologic field studies to identify determinants of STI/HIV in resource-poor settings.

Epidemiology and Biostatistics | Office of the Dean

(301) 405-7201

Dr. Kleinman is a dentist and a board certified specialist in dental public health. Her research has included epidemiologic studies of dental, oral and craniofacial diseases, oral cancer and HIV-related conditions. She has participated in the development of several Surgeon General reports and was the co-executive editor of Oral Health in America: A Report of the Surgeon General (2000). Dr. Kleinman has a particular interest in enhancing the understanding and elimination of health disparities, with a focus on the role of factors that transcend health conditions such as health determinants, health promotion interventions and health literacy.

Epidemiology and Biostatistics

301-405-4581

Dr. Mei-Ling Ting Lee is Professor and Director of the Biostatistics Research Center at the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Lee holds Fellowship status in several international statistical organizations, including the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the Royal Statistical Society. She was named the Mosteller Statistician of the Year in 2005 by the American Statistical Association, Boston Chapter.

Her current research is focused in the following areas: (a) Statistical Methods for High Throughput Data Obtained from Microarray Gene Expression Studies, Genomewide Association Studies, and Proteomic Studies using Mass Spectrometry; (b) Threshold Regression Models for Risk Assessments: with Applications in Cancer, Environmental Research and Occupational Exposure; (c) Rank-based Nonparametric Tests for Correlated Data: with Applications in Epidemiology and Genomics; (d) Lifetime Data Analysis; (e) Multivariate Distributional Theory and Applications; (f) Statistical Applications in Microbiology and Pharmacokinetics.

Dr. Lee has published a book on "Analysis of Microarray Gene Expression Data" and co-edited two other books. Dr. Lee is the founding editor and editor-in-chief of the international journal Lifetime Data Analysis, the only international statistical journal that is specialized in modeling time-to-event data. The journal is currently publishing the fifteen's volume.

Click here to Dr. Lee's research webpage

Epidemiology and Biostatistics

(301) 405-7251

Dr. Lee is a social epidemiologist with a main research interest in social determinants of health. Her research has focused on the major social determinants of cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline, and health behaviors. More recently, Dr. Lee is examining multilevel predictors of obesity in adolescent girls. In this study, she is investigating individual, neighborhood, and school level factors that influence change in weight and percent body fat.

Dr. Lee's other main research area is Health Disparities Studies focusing on Asian Americans. Her research in this area looks into various health problems and challenges that Asian Americans face as a minority group, as well as proposing potential recommendations that may contribute in reducing health disparities. Her recent work includes a health needs assessment in 13 Asian American communities, smoking studies in four Asian American communities, and a liver cancer prevention study in three Asian American communities in Maryland. All of this work has been carried out through close partnerships with various Asian American communities in Maryland.

Dr. Lee's homepage

Epidemiology and Biostatistics

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(301) 405-2491

Brit I. Saksvig, Ph.D., M.H.S. is a Research Assistant Professor. Dr. Saksvig received her masters and doctorate degrees from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research interests focus on dietary and physical activity behaviors and their association with the prevention of chronic disease. Dr. Saksvig's primary interest is in developing and evaluating school and community-based interventions for children and adolescents.

Dr. Saksvig is the MPH Internship Coordinator and Graduate Director for the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

Epidemiology and Biostatistics

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(301) 405-3085

Tongtong Wu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of Maryland College Park. Dr. Wu obtained her Ph.D. from the Department of Biostatistics, UCLA School of Public Health in 2006, and then she worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Human Genetics, UCLA.

Dr. Wu is a biostatistician with interests in survival analysis, computational statistics, and statistical genetics. While studying methods of survival analysis, she focuses on semi/nonparametric modeling and two-stage design. In the field of computational statistics, Dr. Wu works on multi-category classification and variable selection. Her research can be applied to cancer classification and the genetic determination of diseases and has other useful applications. Dr. Wu also studies longitudinal data analysis as it applies to HIV research.

Epidemiology and Biostatistics | Kinesiology

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(301) 405-0271

Dr. Young is a physical activity epidemiologist with research expertise in community-based physical activity intervention trials, physical activity assessment, cardiovascular disease risk factors, and obesity prevention. She mostly studies population subgroups that are known to be underactive, such as racial/ethnically diverse women and adolescent girls. Dr. Young is an affiliate faculty member in Kinesiology.

Dr. Young's research is funded by the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She has led and participated in a number of extramurally-funded projects evaluating the effects of community-based interventions on physical activity, obesity and weight gain prevention, and cardiovascular disease risk factors.

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Epidemiology and Biostatistics

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(301) 405-3102

Guangyu Zhang, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. She obtained her PhD in 2007 from the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan, School of Public Health, and a master degree from Nutritional Sciences from Cornell University. Her major research interest is in the missing data field, Bayesian methods, longitudinal data analysis and mixture models. She is also interested in the applications of biostatistics to the public health-related topics, such as obesity, hypertension, HIV/AIDs, aging, and cancer.

Courses:

EPIB 655 Longitudinal Data Analysis (Spring 2008)

EPIB698A Special Topics: Introduction to SAS Statistical Programming

Links:

More information about Biostatistics:

http://www.amstat.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=main

Epidemiology and Biostatistics

(301) 405-8547

Epidemiology and Biostatistics

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(301) 405-6589

Mira Grieser, M.H.S., is a Faculty Research Assistant in the Department of Kinesiology. She received her masters degree from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, department of International Health. She has experience in program evaluation, instrument development, and qualitative data collection and analysis. Her research interests focus on physical activity, obesity, and chronic disease prevention. She is currently working on Trial of Activity for Adolescent Girls (TAAG), a multi-site study.

Epidemiology and Biostatistics

(301) 405-2550

Tao is a biostatistician at the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistcs at the school of Public Health.

Epidemiology and Biostatistics

(301) 405-6421

Cong is a Faculty Resident assistant at the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the School of Public Health.

Epidemiology and Biostatistics | Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health

(301) 405-5509

Dr. Milton is Professor and Director of MIAEH and Affiliate Faculty in Epidemiology and Biostatistics. He received his BS in Chemistry from the University of Maryland Baltimore County, his MD from Johns Hopkins University and his DrPH (Environmental Health) from Harvard University. He trained in medicine at Emory and Boston Universities and Occupational and Environmental Medicine at Harvard. He joined the Harvard School of Public Health Faculty in 1990 and was appointed Professor in University of Massachusetts Lowell's School of Health and Environment in 2005. He is board certified in internal and occupational medicine and has 20 years experience in an occupational medicine referral practice. He has taught courses on aerobiology, toxicology, indoor air quality, respiratory epidemiology, physiology, pathology, pathophysiology. He is currently Adjunct Senior Lecturer on Occupational and Environmental Health at Harvard School of Public Health, Lecturer on Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Attending Physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Dr. Milton is a past chair of the ACGIH Bioaerosols committee and a member of the committee since 1988. He is chair of the external advisory board for the UTMB Environmental Health Science Center, Galveston, TX. He is a member of the editorial boards of Applied Environmental Microbiology, Indoor Air, and BMC Public Health. He was elected a Fellow of the International Society for Indoor Air Quality and Climate in 2008.

Dr. Milton leads multidisciplinary investigations of the health effects of bioaerosols with three major themes: 1) the relationship of asthma onset and exacerbation to exposure to allergens and microbial products, 2) investigation and prevention of airborne infection transmission, and 3) exhaled breath analysis. His asthma research includes studies of occupational asthma and the impact of ambient bioaerosols on asthma exacerbation, especially the impact of low level, early life endotoxin exposure on the risk of childhood allergy and asthma. His research on mechanisms and prevention of airborne infection transmission includes productivity effects of rhinovirus colds in office workers and asthmatic children, mathematical models, and laboratory and epidemiological studies of control methods for influenza and agents of biological warfare and terrorism. Exhaled breath analysis is a unifying theme with ongoing work on exhaled gas and particle phase biomarkers for lung inflammation and studies of exhaled particles as the vehicle of airborne communicable disease transmission.

Click here to see Dr. Milton's recent presentation on mechanisms of transmission of swine flu, given at the Institute of Medicine August 12, 2009.

Dr. Milton's Lab Webpage

Epidemiology and Biostatistics | Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health

(301) 405-8716

Dr. Amir Sapkota holds a joint appointment at the Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health and the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Dr. Sapkota received his PhD in Environmental Health Sciences from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and his BS in Chemistry from Clark University. He joins the growing number of faculty at UMCP after successfully completing post-doctoral work at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France.

Understanding exposures that occur among individuals and identifying markers of cellular responses that can predict the development of future diseases enables public health practitioners to identify specific subpopulations at risk, who subsequently can be targeted with proper interventions to prevent such disease occurrence. Within this framework, Dr. Sapkota's primary research interests lie in the area of exposure assessment and environmental epidemiology. He is interested in utilizing personal air measurements, as well as urinary and serum biomarkers to understand the risk of diseases associated with exposures to various air pollutants such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), in the environment and at the workplace. At UMCP, Dr. Sapkota will work on a range of topics including the inner city environment and asthma; impacts of traffic on community air pollution; and indoor air pollution from solid fuel usage in developing countries and risk of lung cancer, to name a few.

Epidemiology and Biostatistics | Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health

(301) 405-1772

Dr. Amy R. Sapkota has a joint appointment with the Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health and the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. She received a PhD in Environmental Health Sciences from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, an MPH in Environmental Health Sciences from the Yale School of Public Health and a BS in Biology from the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Sapkota also holds a Certificate in Risk Sciences and Public Policy, and completed post-doctoral fellowships at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Environmental Microbial Genomics Group within Le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Lyon, France.

Dr. Sapkota's research interests lie in the areas of microbial environmental exposure assessment and environmental epidemiology, with a focus on evaluating the complex relationships between the environment, food and water production systems, and human infectious diseases. Current research projects include: 1) evaluating changes in bacterial antibiotic resistance as large-scale poultry farms transition to organic practices; 2) investigating the prevalence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in tertiary-treated wastewater used for spray irrigation; and 3) utilizing metagenomic methods to understand total bacterial biodiversity in cigarettes, smokeless tobacco products and environmental tobacco smoke. Other areas of interest include the human health impacts associated with exposures to bacterial and viral pathogens prevalent in the Chesapeake Bay.

Epidemiology and Biostatistics | Family Science

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(301) 405-3658

Shenassa's research is primarily focused on families' mental and physical well-being with an emphasis on two general areas: the developmental consequences of prenatal and perinatal exposure to toxins and social disparities in health with a focus on the role of housing and other built environments. As an epidemiologist, Shenassa's work is informed by the fields of sociology and psychology and aims to address questions that can improve public health interventions or shape policy and regulation. His focus on the built environment, particularly housing conditions, is motivated by the potential to reduce health disparities through existing local and federal housing policies.