January to October, 2009

John Briscoe, Professor of the Practice of Environmental Health, HSPH, and Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Environmental Health, SEAS

Briscoe focuses on issues of water and economic development. He has worked as an engineer in the water agencies of South Africa and Mozambique; as an epidemiologist at the Cholera Research Center in Bangladesh; as a professor of water resources at the University of North Carolina; and, for the past 20 years in a variety of policy and operational positions in the World Bank. Most recently he has served as the Bank's Senior Water Advisor and the Country Director for Brazil.

Francesca Dominici, Professor of Biostatistics

Dominici focuses on developing new mathematical and statistical methods for identifying subtle but important health risks within complex databases. She is particularly interested in developing models to better understand the health effects of air pollution. She led the statistical analyses for the two large nationwide studies of particulate matter and ozone -- the National Morbidity and Mortality Study (NMMAPS) of daily air pollution and health in the largest U.S. cities, and the National Medicare Air Pollution Study (MCAPS), a study of acute and chronic exposure to air pollution. Her contributions have helped inform current air pollution regulation in the U.S. In addition, she has also focused on developing statistical tools to analyze patient safety data to reduce medical errors and has worked on methods to elucidate the epidemiology of smoking patterns.  

Curtis Huttenhower, Assistant Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics

Huttenhower's research is concerned with the discovery of useful biological knowledge in large collections of genomic data. Modern biological experiments each represent a detailed snapshot of a cell or organism's internal state, and public repositories already contain many thousands of experimental results and are constantly growing in size and diversity. Taken together, these data can be used to reconstruct detailed models of cellular behavior in response to changing environmental conditions, regulatory and metabolic regimes, and disease states. The goal of this research is to allow any new biomedical question to be answered by extracting information from the entire body of existing and novel experimental data, using data integration to allow results from basic research to be applied to genomic and personalized medicine (and vice versa). 

Giovanni Parmigiani, Professor of Biostatistics and Chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Parmigiani's principal research interest is the development of statistical and computational methods to capture and assess biomedical data, including models and software for predicting a person's risk of cancer. He has helped devise a number of bioinformatics software tools and programs, including BRCAPRO, which is used in genetic counseling of families at high risk of breast and ovarian cancer, and BayesMendel, a suite of tools that covers a broad range of familial risk prediction tasks in breast, ovarian, colorectal, and pancreatic cancers.  

Tyler VanderWeele, Associate Professor of Epidemiology

VanderWeele's research concerns theory and methods for drawing causal inferences in epidemiology and the social sciences. Much of his current research in this area relates to tests for causal interactions, specifically for detecting whether there are mechanisms such that a particular outcome will occur only if two or more exposures are present. Another area of focus is sensitivity analysis techniques for confounding. Confounding is an issue in almost all observational research, and it is important to understand how sensitive one's research conclusions are to assumptions made about the absence of confounding. A third area is causal inference for assessing the extent to which the effect of one variable on another is mediated by some intermediate variable.  

Winston Hide, Associate Professor of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology

Hide uses data from the genome, transcriptomics, protein-protein interaction and gene regulation to discover genes critical to disease processes occurring in cancer and infectious disease. His group also performs computational simplification and integration of data to find relationships between molecular events.

Ellie Starr, Vice Dean for External Relations

Starr comes to HSPH from the Perkins School for the Blind, where she served as Executive Director of the Perkins Trust. During her tenure at Perkins, Starr restructured Perkins' development office, built and led a team of development professionals to increase fundraising by 40 percent, and launched the largest fundraising campaign in Perkins' 180-year history. A 17-year veteran of the development field, Starr spent eight years at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) prior to her time at Perkins. At DFCI, Starr built the highly successful principal and major gifts efforts and developed fundraising strategies and plans for the $1 billion Mission Possible Campaign, the largest in DFCI history.

Till Baernighausen, Assistant Professor of Global Health

 

 

Jessica Cohen, Assistant Professor of Global Health

 

 

Liming Liang, Assistant Professor of Statistical Genetics