Principal Investigator | Team Member
Education
Free University Medical Center Amsterdam: MD (2004)
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health: PhD International Health (2009)
Affiliations
University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, Department of Epidemiology
University of Pittsburgh Public Health Dynamics Laboratory
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Department of Biomedical Informatics
Biography
I am a principal investigator of Project Tycho since its inception in 2013. I am an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH). I am also an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh as well as an affiliate faculty of the Public Health Dynamics Laboratory. I received my MD from the Free University Amsterdam and my PhD in Global Disease Epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
My research is focused on improving the efficient use of information for public health action, at the intersection of data science and public health. I have led research on the collection, curation, and integration of disease surveillance data for all notifiable diseases in the United States from 1888 to the present, as part of Project Tycho development. We used this extensive US dataset to demonstrate that childhood vaccination prevented 100 million cases of serious childhood diseases(NEJM, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal).
More recently, my team completed research on the integration and analysis of dengue surveillance data from eight Southeast Asia countries, resulting in the discovery of an association between high temperatures and dengue dynamics across all countries (PNAS, NIH Director's Blog).
I am also funded by the NIH Big Data to Knowledge program to work on improving methods for population health informatics, in particular representing global health data in a machine-interpretable format, towards compliance with FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) guidelines for data management. In addition, I am funded by the US NIH as project PI of the Models of Infectious Disease Agents Study (MIDAS) Center of Excellence and by the Gates Foundation as project lead of the Vaccine Modeling Initiative (VMI).
Finally, I coordinate an outreach program on global health data and computational epidemiology funded by the Benter Foundation in Pittsburgh and various industry sponsors. At the University of Pittsburgh, I lecture on infectious disease epidemiology, global health, and teach a graduate class in vaccine epidemiology. I am also involved in developing a Data Science curriculum at GSPH. I enjoy cooking, drinking wine, sailing, and spending time in nature.
