My work sits between clinical informatics and epidemiology. The through-line is people and the places they move through, and how that affects their risk of disease and death. Sometimes the exposure and displacement is acute, as in crisis settings. Sometimes it is chronic, like climate-driven migration. My methodological interests cut across my domain interests: displacement, disease, and death.
On the clinical side, I apply causal inference, statistical learning, and geospatial analysis to large-scale clinical, demographic, and geographic data. This includes comparative effectiveness research: randomized and pragmatic trials where feasible, target trial emulation where a trial is not, and implementation science to carry the evidence into practice.
On the population health side, I combine field survey data, syndromic surveillance, and mobility data for humanitarian emergency response, in the War in Syria, the 2018 floods in India, the Rohingya refugee crisis, and climate-driven displacement in North Carolina. This is field epidemiology, applied where migration & displacement and health meet.
My dissertation links spatiotemporal data with individual-level health data, and uses the linked records to quantify the cumulative burden of climate extremes on population displacement, disease, and death. The estimation applies causal inference, statistical learning, and geospatial analysis to large-scale clinical, demographic, and geographic data, with climate extremes as the exposures of interest and movement as the pathway connecting them to health.
As a Graduate Research Assistant with
Dr. Emily Pfaff, I apply causal inference within a target trial framework to assess the comparative effectiveness of treatments in the
National Clinical Cohort Collaborative (N3C) and the NIH RECOVER Initiative. The same work applies statistical learning, including graph analysis, natural language processing, and dimensionality reduction, to automated cohort identification and computable phenotyping.
With Dr. Barbara Entwisle at the Carolina Population Center, I study how electronic health record data can inform population health research on population mobility dynamics, a bridge between clinical data and migration & displacement.