Jiyoung Ahn, PhD, MS, RD, is Assistant Professor of Population Health and Environmental Medicine at NYU School of Medicine. After receiving her PhD at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, Dr. Ahn completed her postdoctoral studies in genetic and nutritional epidemiology at the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute in Bethesda.

Her research goal is to improve the understanding of the inter-relationship of diet, genetics and other environmental factors in the causation of cancer and cardiovascular disease. She is currently the PI of 6 funded molecular epidemiologic studies on 1) human gut microbiome, diet intake, and risk of colorectal cancer (NIH R03); 2) human oral microbiome and risk of pancreatic cancer (AACR Career Development Award); 3) human oral microbiome and preclinical atherosclerosis (NYU-Abu Dhabi); 4) identification of genetic loci involved in prostate cancer susceptibility (NIH U19); 5) genome wide gene expression markers for prostate cancer progression (DOD New Investigator Award); and 6) air pollution and diet interaction in mortality (NIH R21). She is a co-investigator of 2 additional studies on 1) human oral microbiome and upper aerodigestive cancer risk (NIH R01) and 2) air pollution and mortality (NIH R01).

She has reported her research in 55 peer-reviewed papers, including first/senior authored publication in Nature Genetics, JNCI, Cancer Research, Human Molecular Genetics, and the Archives of Internal Medicine. The quality of her research has also been recognized by significant awards and honors, including two NCI-Outstanding Research Paper Awards, the NCI-Intramural Research Award for Innovative Research, the NCI-Fellowship Achievement Award for Outstanding Accomplishments, the AACR-Women in Cancer Research-Leventhal Scholar Award, an AACR Career Development Award, and Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Award.

Jessica Athens received her doctorate in Population Health Sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2012). She also earned master’s degrees in Population Health (2008) and Urban Planning (2005) from UW. She has worked with the International Food Policy Research Institute; the Network for the Improvement of Addiction Treatment; and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. In her dissertation research, she focused on methodological improvements to the County Health Rankings (www.countyhealthrankings.org), including estimating rank precision and generating risk-adjusted ranks for health outcomes in all U.S. counties. She has also worked with the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s Syndromic Surveillance Unit, developing novel syndromes for non-infectious conditions, as well as exploring geographic variation in syndromes across New York City zip codes, neighborhoods, and hospitals.

Carolyn Berry, PhD joined the faculty of the NYU Langone School of Medicine as Associate Professor in September 2011. Since 2008, Dr. Berry had been Director of Research and Evaluation at the Center for Health Care Strategies, with responsibility for the research and evaluation design for CHCS programs in disparities reduction and care management for Medicaid beneficiaries. Dr. Berry has been affiliated with NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service for over ten years, as Deputy Director for its Center for Health and Public Service Research, and lead faculty of the Wagner School’s Program Evaluation and Policy Analysis Course. She is a graduate of Wake Forest University’s psychology program (BA and MA) and NYU’s doctoral program in community psychology.

Dr. Berry has been evaluating policies and policy relevant programs in public health, health care, and social services for over 20 years. Her evaluation and research work has involved a wide range of partners in collaboration, including government agencies (state and local), a wide variety of non-profit organizations, community based organizations, unions, and foundations. Her work has typically been multi-disciplinary and involved mixed methods and has spanned a variety of substantive areas, linked by a focus on the poor and underserved. She is currently heavily involved in the study and evaluation of the patient centered medical care (PCMH) model currently promoted as an ideal model for primary care delivery.

Saul Blecker, MD, MHS, is an Instructor at the NYU School of Medicine. His research focuses on the epidemiology, outcomes and quality of care for heart failure and related chronic conditions such as diabetes. In his work, Dr. Blecker applies health services tools and uses advance analytic methods to examine large datasets that integrate clinical, utilization and cost data. He has studied biomarkers that signal high risk for the onset of heart failure, identified the contribution of heart failure to both cardiovascular and non-cardiovascular hospitalizations, and explored the relationship of comorbidities to clinical and economic outcomes.

Dr. Blecker holds an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Columbia University and a medical degree from Tufts University. He completed residency in internal medicine at NYU, followed by a fellowship in General Internal Medicine at Johns Hopkins University where he also received a master’s degree in epidemiology. Dr. Blecker is the director of the Heart Failure clinic at Bellevue Hospital.

Dr. R. Scott Braithwaite, MD, MSc, is an Associate Professor and Chief of the Section on Value and Effectiveness (SOLVE) at New York University School of Medicine and President Elect of the Society of Medical Decision Making. Dr. Braithwaite earned his medical degree from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1993. Following medical school, he went on to complete a fellowship in clinical decision making at Tufts University in 2001, and since then has completed his master’s degree in science from the University of Pittsburgh.

Dr. Braithwaite is a recipient of a prestigious Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Faculty Scholar award. He is an accomplished investigator in the field of decision science, quality and cost-effectiveness with an outstanding record of funding from the NIH and other extramural sources. As chief of SOLVE, he is dedicated to advancing a program of rigorous, policy-relevant research to optimize quality and value in healthcare, incorporating methods of decision science, comparative effectiveness and cost effectiveness. In addition to his focus on improving care for chronic illness domestically, he also continues his important international work on HIV treatment strategies in developing countries.

Currently the Drs. William F and Virginia Connolly Mitty Professor and founding head of the Division of Bioethics at New York University Langone Medical Center in New York City.

Prior to coming to NYU he was the Sidney D. Caplan Professor of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia where he creates the Center for Bioethics and the Department of Medical Ethics. Caplan has also taught at the University of Minnesota, where he founded the Center for Biomedical Ethics, the University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia University. He was the Associate Director of the Hastings Center from 1984-1987.

Born in Boston, Caplan did his undergraduate work at Brandeis University, and did his graduate work at Columbia University where he received a PhD in the history and philosophy of science in 1979.

Caplan is the author or editor of thirty books and over 550 papers in refereed journals. His most recent books are Smart Mice Not So Smart People (Rowman Littlefield, 2006) and the Penn Guide to Bioethics (Springer, 2009).

He has served on a number of national and international committees including as the Chair, National Cancer Institute Biobanking Ethics Working Group; the Chair of the Advisory Committee to the United Nations on Human Cloning; the Chair of the Advisory Committee to the Department of Health and Human Services on Blood Safety and Availability; a member of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Illnesses; the special advisory committee to the International Olympic Committee on genetics and gene therapy; the ethics committee of the American Society of Gene Therapy and the special advisory panel to the National Institutes of Mental Health on human experimentation on vulnerable subjects. He recently served as the Co-Director of the Joint Council of Europe/United Nations Study on Trafficking in Organs and Body Parts. He is currently the ethics advisor to DOD/DARPA on synthetic biology.

Dr. Yu Chen, Associate Professor of Epidemiology, is a chronic disease epidemiologist with experience in epidemiologic projects involving multidisciplinary teamwork. Her research focuses on how host and environmental factors are related to the risk of clinical and preclinical endpoints of cancer and cardiovascular disease. She has worked with colleagues from Columbia University and the University of Chicago for the past 12 years to evaluate health effects of arsenic exposure from drinking water. She is a recipient of the Outstanding New Environmental Scientist Award (ONES) from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) to study the interactions between arsenic exposure from drinking water and genetic susceptibility related to inflammation and oxidative stress in cardiovascular disease. With funding from the American Heart Association and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), Dr. Chen has conducted case-control studies nested in the New York University Women’s Health Study (NYUWHS) to evaluate the association between serum taruine, a nutrient and popular ingredient in energy drinks, and the risk of coronary heart disease and stroke.

Recently, Dr. Chen completed an exploratory/development research project that assesses the association between oral health conditions and the risk of gastric precancerous lesions. She is expanding the research scope to study the effects of oral and gastric microbiome on the risk of gastric precancerous lesions in the future. Dr. Chen has also been involved in several projects that evaluate health effects of Helicobacter pylori using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Together with Dr. Anne Zeleniuch-Jacquotte, Dr. Chen has been directing the course on advanced epidemiology methods for graduate students since 2006. She received her PhD with distinction in Epidemiology from Columbia University in 2005. As of May, 2013, Dr. Chen is an author of more than 94 peer-reviewed journal articles.

Brian Elbel is an Assistant Professor of Population Health and Health Policy at the NYU School of Medicine, where he heads the Section on Health Choice, Policy and Evaluation, and at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, where he is also Director of the Doctoral Program. Dr. Elbel studies how individuals make decisions that influence their health and healthcare, with a particular emphasis on obesity and food choice. His work uses behavioral economics to understand health and healthcare decision-making among vulnerable groups, and the role and influence of public policy on these decisions. Current research includes examinations of consumer choice of health plans and hospitals, including response to quality information; how to use behavioral economics to influence physicians’ prescribing practices; the impact of public policies mandating calorie labeling in restaurants; the impact of NYC’s policy limiting the size of sugar sweetened beverages at food service establishments; and the impact of policies supporting the development of supermarkets in high need areas; among others. He directs the CDC-funded NYU Nutrition and Obesity Policy Research and Evaluation Network (NOPREN), which is evaluating several New York City initiatives intended to improve healthy eating and drinking in New York City. His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the New York State Health Foundation, and the Aetna Foundation. His work has been featured in numerous national television, radio, and print media outlets. Dr. Elbel has a B.A. from The University of Texas at Austin and an MPH and PhD in Health Policy/Health Economics from Yale University.

Dr. Fang is an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics in the Division of Biostatistics. His statistical research interests include data mining, genetic epidemiology, and econometrics. He is also interested in developing and applying statistical methods in different areas including general internal medicine, value and effectiveness, and otolaryngology. Dr. Fang received his PhD in Statistics from Columbia University.

Yixin Fang’s Homepage

George Friedman-Jimenez, MD is director and attending physician in the Bellevue / NYU Occupational & Environmental Medicine Clinic (BNOEMC). His professional activities include clinical occupational and environmental medicine, epidemiologic research and medical education. A primary goal of these activities is translation of environmental health science and epidemiologic knowledge into improved health of individual patients as well as the larger populations served by the clinic and the physicians being trained in the medical school.

The mission of the BNOEMC is to provide clinical, preventive, and educational occupational medicine services that are high quality and accessible to the diverse populations of workers in New York City that are at high risk for work-related diseases. The clinic sees patients with a variety of potentially hazardous occupational and environmental exposures. Examples of medical complaints that may be related to those exposures include asthma triggered by environmental exposures in or outside the workplace, lead and other heavy metal toxicity, solvent-related neuropathies, allergic respiratory and skin disorders, and dust-related pulmonary fibrosis. His environmental health science research has focused on epidemiologic studies of environmental exposures that aggravate asthma, on mortality experience of men stationed on nuclear submarines and exposed to ionizing radiation, and on several ongoing pilot studies of working populations that include patients seen in the clinic.

Over the past 15 years, Dr. Friedman-Jimenez has co-directed and directed the NYU medical school course “Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Preventive Medicine” and has developed and led the sections on Analytic Epidemiology, Clinical Epidemiology (focusing largely on diagnostic testing and interpretation of clinical trials), and Preventive Medicine (medical screening, vaccination, occupational / environmental medicine, clinical toxicology). As NYUSM is undertaking a thorough curriculum revision, he continues to be content director for these topics. He is board certified in Internal Medicine and Preventive Medicine (Occupational) and has completed a 3 year NCI-sponsored postdoctoral fellowship in Epidemiology.

Heather Taffet Gold, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Section on Value and Effectiveness and Assistant Director of Health Disparities and Outcomes Research in the NYU Cancer Institute. She received her PhD in Health Services Research and Policy from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. Dr. Gold holds a BS degree in biology from the University of California at San Diego and earned an MA degree in public policy studies from the University of Chicago, after which she was a health policy analyst working on major policy issues in Washington, DC.

Dr. Gold is a health services researcher whose work focuses on identifying and evaluating the implications of socioeconomic, racial/ethnic, and geographic disparities in cancer care and on the adoption and diffusion of new medical technology. She seeks to determine how differences in care affect health and economic outcomes in order to provide the basis for new health care policies that encourage appropriate use of medical technology in ways that save lives and efficiently and fairly allocate available resources.

Dr. Goldberg has a BA in Mathematics from Barnard College and SM and ScD in Biostatistics from the Harvard University School of Public Health. She has been Professor and Director of the Division of Biostatistics at New York University School of Medicine since 1999. She directs the PhD. program in Biostatistics, the Biostatistics Shared Resource of the NYU Cancer Institute, the Study Design, Biostatistics and Clinical Research Ethics Core of the NYU-HHC Clinical Translational Science Institute, and the Environmental Health Statistics and Bioinformatics Facility of the NIEHS Center at NYU. Dr. Goldberg also is the Principal Investigator of the Statistics and Data Management Core of the NCI funded Myeloproliferative Disorder Research Consortium and a co-investigator on numerous other collaborative research grants in clinical and translational research in oncology and other areas. She has over 125 publications in statistics and substantive journals.

Prior to joining NYU School of Medicine, Dr. Goldberg was Vice President, Biostatistics and Data Management at Bristol Myers Squibb; Executive Director, Statistics and Data Management, Lederle Laboratories; Associate Professor, Biostatistics, Mount Sinai School of Medicine; Research Statistician, Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York.

Dr. Goldberg is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has held numerous offices in national and international organizations including President of the Biometric Society (ENAR), Chair of the Fellows Committee of the American Statistical Association, and Chair of the Statistics Section U of the AAAS.

Dr. Goldberg serves on NIH study sections and has been a member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee. She is a reviewer for multiple statistical and substantive journals and most recently was an Associate Editor for Statistics in Biopharmaceutical Sciences.

Keith Goldfeld, DrPH, is a biostatistician interested in health services research, causal inference, and cost-effectiveness analysis. He joined the faculty of the NYU Langone School of Medicine as Instructor in September 2012. Dr. Goldfeld recently completed his DrPH at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, where his research explored methodologies to analyze the cost-effectiveness of treatment strategies for patients at the end-of-life based on observational and censored data. He was previously director of Medical Economics at HealthFirst, a hospital-owned managed care organization in New York City, and served as the lead Medicaid analyst at New York City’s Independent Budget Office. Dr. Goldfeld also earned an MPA from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and an MS in Statistics from the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College in New York City.

Marc N. Gourevitch, MD., MPH, is Professor and founding Chair of the Department of Population Health at the NYU School of Medicine. The focus of Dr. Gourevitch’s work is to improve population health through interventions in the delivery of health care. He is co-Director of the Community Engagement and Population Health Research Core of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute that bridges NYU with New York City’s municipal hospital system, the Health and Hospitals Corporation. His research interests center on health service utilization and clinical epidemiology among drug users and other underserved populations; integrating pharmacologic treatments for opioid and alcohol dependence into primary care; and effective strategies for promoting behavior change in general medical settings. Dr. Gourevitch holds joint appointments in the Departments of Medicine and of Psychiatry as well as at NYU Wagner.

Dr. Negin Hajizadeh is an accomplished pulmonary and critical care physician whose research focuses on using decision-analytic modeling to better inform and encourage shared end of life decision making—the process by which patients and clinicians work together to fully explore treatment options and possible outcomes, and make an informed decision together. She is particularly focused on informing health care policy in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), and ensuring that patients receive care that produces outcomes congruent with their preferences and expectations. As the recipient of several honors, awards, and grants, as well as a long history of service volunteering her skills in underserved areas—both nationally and internationally—Dr. Hajizadeh brings a wealth of clinical, research, and humanitarian experience to NYU Medicine’s Section on Value and Effectiveness (SOLVE).

Dr. Hayes leads the Division of Epidemiology and is Associate Director for Population Sciences of the NYU Cancer Institute. Dr. Hayes’ research program focuses on genetic and environmental factors related to cancer risk. He studies head and neck, prostate and colon cancer. His recent investigations include study of the oral microbiome and head and neck cancer and studies on air pollution and mortality.

Nadia Islam, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Population Health at NYU School of Medicine. She serves as the Deputy Director of the NYU Center for the Study of Asian American Health and Director of the NYU Prevention Research Center. Dr. Islam specializes in community based participatory methods and health disparities research within Asian American and immigrant communities, and has expertise in qualitative methods, community-based models of cardiovascular disease and diabetes prevention and management, cancer control research, and access to healthcare issues. Dr. Islam is Principal Investigator of the NIH and CDC-funded DREAM Project (Diabetes Research, Education, and Action), a community health worker program designed to improve diabetes control and diabetes-related health complications in the Bangladeshi community in New York City and the CDC-funded RICE Project (Reaching Immigrant through Community Empowerment), a community health worker intervention designed to promote diabetes prevention in the Korean and South Asian community. Dr. Islam is also Principal Investigator of the MARHABA study (Muslim Americans Reaching for Health and Building Alliances), a CDC-funded study that examines barriers and facilitators to breast and cervical cancer screening among Muslim women in New York City. Dr. Islam is also a co-investigator of the B-Free CEED: the B Free National Center of Excellence in the Elimination of Hepatitis B Disparities and the Strategies to Reach and Implement the Vision of Health Equity (STRIVE) project, both funded by the CDC as part of its Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health (REACH) efforts. Dr. Islam completed her doctorate in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University.

Girardin Jean-Louis, PhD is Professor of Population Health at the Center for Healthful Behavior Change in the Department of Population Health at the NYU School of Medicine, and Director of the NHLBI-funded PRIDE Summer Institute on Behavioral Medicine and Sleep Disorders Training Institute. Dr. Jean-Louis has been involved in several important NIH-funded studies, which have led to over 200 publications, primarily in sleep and cardio-metabolic diseases, circadian rhythm, and health disparities. His research findings have appeared in 125 scientific conference proceedings and book chapters, and 75 peer-reviewed scientific journals. The overarching goal of his research is to address patient-level, provider-level, and system-level barriers hindering adoption of healthful practices. His research focuses on the application of tailored behavioral models to enhance treatment adherence in order to reduce risk of cardiovascular disease and early mortality among underserved or disadvantaged minorities. Dr. Jean-Louis’ research addresses sociocultural and environmental determinants of health behavior preventing access to adequate care in disparity communities, which are disproportionately burdened by adverse cardiovascular outcomes. His current studies aim to delineate barriers hindering diagnosis and treatment of sleep apnea-related metabolic diseases among minorities and to ascertain efficacy of behavioral models in enhancing adherence to recommended therapies. Studies also aim to engage patients as well as community providers and stakeholders in developing messages to promote health literacy at the community level. His research and educational programs link community health promotion to the healthcare system, thus achieving objectives of the national mandate to increase health parity in vulnerable communities.

Sue A. Kaplan, J.D., is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Population Health and a Research Scientist at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. The focus of her work is on disparities in health outcomes for vulnerable populations in urban areas. Recent projects include the evaluation of a CDC initiative to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in health, focusing on diabetes and heart disease in the South Bronx; the evaluation of a national collaboration funded by RWJF to improve cardiovascular care for minority populations; and an NIH initiative to develop and evaluate a faith-based health outreach program. Currently, she is working with the United Hospital Fund on a community initiative to improve diabetes management for the elderly in Washington Heights, and with Maimonides Medical Center on their development of a model to coordinate care for the seriously mentally ill. Before coming to NYU, Professor Kaplan was the Vice President for Planning and Director of Special Projects and Policy at the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation.

A graduate of Harvard Law School and Wesleyan University, Professor Kaplan is a member and past Chair of the Board of the Bank Street College of Education. She also served as a member of the Board of Advisors to the Gateway to Higher Education, an educational enrichment program designed to increase the number of minority students pursuing higher education in science and medicine. She is a member and past Chair of the IRB for the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. She recently joined the Advisory Board for the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, also serving on the Selection Committee for the annual Joan H. Tisch Community Health Prize, and the Board of Trustees of the New York Foundation.

Dr. Jason Kessler is an Instructor in the Section on Value and Effectiveness (SOLVE) at NYU Langone Medical Center. Prior to joining our team here in New York, Dr. Kessler spent three years in Botswana working within the confines of the Division of Infections Diseases at the University of Pennsylvania. In Botswana, he was an Attending Physician who organized clinical teaching rounds and didactic sessions focused on the HIV infected patient in the developing world setting.

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in neuroscience, Dr. Kessler pursued his MD at the State University of New York, where he was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha honor society. He also has an MPH in Epidemiology from the Mailman School of Public Health. Upon completing his medical degree, Dr. Kessler completed an Internal Medicine Residency Program at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Additionally, he completed an Infectious Disease Fellowship at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. Currently, Dr. Kessler is expanding his knowledge of Comparative Effectiveness, and is a scholar at the CTSI Comparative Effectiveness Research Certification Program at NYU School of Medicine.

Dr. Kessler’s major research interests are operational research and comparative effectiveness of HIV care and treatment and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases, including HIV. He looks forward to collaborating with his talented colleagues in these areas of research.

Tomas Kirchhoff is a cancer geneticist and genetic epidemiologist working in the area of genetic susceptibility of common malignancies. He joined NYULMC in 2011 as an Assistant Professor in the Division of Epidemiology, after completion of his appointment at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The primary interest of Dr. Kirchhoff’s laboratory is focused on the identification of genetic basis of cancer susceptibility. A key question in these efforts is how the germline genetic events contributing to predisposition of human cancers interact mutually in particular molecular pathways or in concert with the environmental exposures. Specifically, Dr. Kirchhoff’s ongoing studies aim at identification of genetic variants conferring an increased risk to common cancers, such as breast, colon, prostate cancers, lymphoma or melanoma, focusing on the relevant molecular pathways. These studies combine the genome-wide association analysis (GWAS), high-throughput genotyping and most recently the next-generation sequencing in large case/control populations or genetically enriched (familial) subsets.

Besides genetic cancer susceptibility, other important goal in these efforts is the discovery of genetic loci with predictive value for disease prognosis or therapy response. For that purpose Dr. Kirchhoff’s laboratory has established intense collaborations with several clinical departments at NYULMC and elsewhere. The significant aspect of Dr. Kirchhoff’s current and future research is an integration of the information from somatic genetics in tumors to complement the germline findings in order to provide efficient modalities not only for improved prevention strategies or prognostic predictions but most importantly for future development of the targeted personalized therapies. Dr. Kirchhoff has authored more than 80 peer reviewed publications and is a PI or co-investigator on several grants from National Cancer Institute or other agencies.

Dr. Koenig has been a member of the Epidemiology faculty since 1989. Her research focuses on the epidemiology of cancers and cardiovascular diseases in women. She is an investigator on the NYU Women’s Health Study, a prospective cohort study of chronic diseases in women. Blood samples were collected from over 14,000 participants at enrollment in 1985-1991, and serum was frozen for future assays. Participants have been actively followed up since enrollment to identify disease outcomes. A series of nested case-control studies have been conducted to investigate associations between serum levels of biomarkers at enrollment and the subsequent development of diseases. These investigations have shown that higher postmenopausal levels of endogenous estrogens are associated with increased risks of breast, endometrial and colorectal cancer, but that postmenopausal levels of endogenous estrogens do not appear to influence the risk of coronary heart disease. Dr. Koenig is currently working with Dr. Anne Zeleniuch-Jacquotte investigating the relation between Vitamin D status and risk of breast cancer, and with Dr. Yu Chen studying the relation between circulating taurine levels and cardiovascular diseases in women.

Simona Kwon, DrPH, MPH, is an assistant professor in the Department of Population Health at the NYU School of Medicine with a joint appointment in the NYU Master of Public Health Program. In collaboration and co-leadership with the national organization, the Asian American Pacific Islander American Health Forum, Dr. Kwon serves as the NYU director of the CDC-funded STRIVE Project. The main goal of this project is to work with Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities across the U.S. to implement evidence-based and culturally tailored high impact, population-wide strategies to reduce chronic disease-related risk factors including, poor and over-nutrition and lack of physical activity. Dr. Kwon also serves as an associate investigator of the NYU Center for the Study of Asian American Health, directing the Training and Dissemination Core, and an associate investigator of the NYU Health Promotion and Prevention Research Center. She earned her Master of Public Health in Epidemiology at Yale University, her doctorate in the Division of Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, and completed the two-year W.K. Kellogg Community Scholars Post-doctoral Fellowship at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the Department of Health Behavior & Society.

Dr. Kelly A. Kyanko is an Instructor of Population Health and Medicine at NYU School of Medicine, as well as an Assistant Attending Physician in the Department of Medicine at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York, NY. Dr. Kyanko’s research is largely on policy-relevant questions addressing health care costs and delivery system and payment models. Her work crosses multiple sectors, including work with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Consumers Union and other non-profits, as well as prior internships with the Cleveland Department of Public Health, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and the ABC News Medical Unit in New York City.

Dr. Kyanko received her B.S. from Case Western Reserve University and MD. From New York University School of Medicine. After completing her Internal Medicine training at Columbia University Medical Center, she entered the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program at Yale University School of Medicine, where she earned her M.H.S. in 2011.

Joseph Ladapo is a physician and health policy researcher whose primary research interests include assessing the cost-effectiveness of radiological technologies and reducing the population burden of cardiovascular disease. He graduated from Wake Forest University (magna cum laude), and received his MD from Harvard Medical School and his PhD in Health Policy from Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He completed his clinical training in internal medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. During residency, he was honored with the Daniel Ford Award for health services and outcomes research from Johns Hopkins University. He has also been a regular columnist for the Harvard Focus since 2005, where he discusses his experiences on the medical wards and perspectives on current health policy issues.

Dr. Ladapo’s current research focuses on evaluating the cost-effectiveness of diagnostic technologies for cardiovascular disease and assessing the clinical and economic implications of interventions targeted at reducing cardiovascular disease risk burden. His past work has examined the cost-effectiveness of cardiac computed tomography (CT) in the evaluation of patients with suspected coronary artery disease, and the impact of smoking cessation programs in high-risk patients. He has also explored the factors driving hospital decision-making in the adoption of high-resolution cardiac CT.

Joshua D. Lee MD, MSc is an Assistant Professor in Medicine and Psychiatry at NYULMC. He is board-certified in Internal Medicine (2002) and Addiction Medicine (2007) and is an attending physician at Bellevue Hospital Center, NYULMC, and in the NYC jails. A graduate of the Univ. of Tennessee School of Medicine and Princeton University, Dr. Lee completed a residency and chief residency in primary care internal medicine at NYU/Bellevue and a fellowship and MSc in health service research and clinical epidemiology at Cornell University.

His research focuses on novel treatments of addiction, criminal justice populations, re-entry drug treatment, and medical education surrounding substance abuse. Dr. Lee is the principal investigator of a 2008-2014 NIDA R01 evaluating extended-release naltrexone (XR-NTX) for opioid treatment among persons on parole and probation and a similar current NYU- and Alkermes-supported pilot of XR-NTX in NYC jails. Recently concluded projects include a 2006-2009 NIDA RCT assessing the role of counseling as an adjuvant to pharmacological therapy in opioid dependent patients, a 2007-2009 feasibility study of extended-release naltrexone for alcohol dependence in primary care, a 2006-2008 NIDA study of buprenorphine treatment before and after release from jail in NYC, and a 2006-2007 NYC DOHMH-funded effort of buprenorphine treatment expansion in primary care. Dr. Lee is part of the Addiction Medicine clinic at Bellevue, an attending on the Bellevue Detox Unit, a per diem physician in the NYC jails, and has an Addiction Medicine private practice at NYULMC.

Dr. Li is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Biostatistics. Her research interests lie in statistical methodology and biomedical collaboration. Dr. Li’s statistical research focuses on empirical Bayes inference, likelihood-based variance component analysis, survey methodology and various statistical methods in cancer research, epidemiologic studies, and genetic association studies. She is a member of New York University’s Cancer Institute. Regarding her collaborations, she is a biostatistician for Dr. Martin Blaser‘s research group and assists with study design and provides statistical data analyses of microbiome data. She also collaborates with Dr. Anne-Marie Schmidt’s lab on studies of the mechanisms by which diabetes accelerates atherosclerosis and with Dr. Dan Makarov on GIS Research in Urology and Health Policy.

Dr. Liu is an Associate Professor of Biostatistics and conducts research on semiparametric modeling and inference for survival data, including survival endpoint in joint analysis with longitudinal data, in genetics study, in epidemiology studies and other type of risk-set sampling studies. Dr. Liu currently is the NYU-site PI of an R01 grant on developing innovative statistical methods for survival data and the PI of an exploratory R21 grant on investigating the novel use of penalty regularization technique in handling heterogeneity in pooled studies. She has recently completed an R03 project on studying time-variant effects of cancer risk factors in nested case-control studies. Dr. Liu has also engaged in abroad range of collaborative projects. She is a member of the NYU Cancer Institute and Co-investigator of the NYU Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). She is the biostatistician for the New York University Women’s Health Study (NYUWHS) and also collaborates with the WTC Environmental Health Center (WTCEHC) on health effects of the 9/11 disaster on local residents and workers. Dr. Liu also collaborates with the NYU Bellevue Asthma Registry (NYUBAR) in asthma genetic study with population heterogeneity due to ancestry admixture.

Michael Marmor, PhD., Professor of Environmental Medicine and Medicine is an epidemiologist currently conducting studies of (a) the health effects of exposure to World Trade Center dust, gas and fumes; and (b) HIV prevention including behavioral epidemiologic studies, behavioral intervention research, and analyses of (completed) HIV vaccine clinical trials. Dr. Marmor has long-term interests and experience in ophthalmologic epidemiology and recently formed a multidisciplinary team to investigate the epidemiology, risk factors and consequences of vision-threatening illnesses among the very old. A proposal from this group is pending at the National Eye Institute. He also has interests in the epidemiology of substance abuse and is a member of the Department of Psychiatry's Division of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse. He currently teaches "Introduction to Epidemiology" in the NYU Graduate School of Arts and Sciences program in Environmental Health Sciences and participates in teaching the small group sessions for the NYU School of Medicine course, "Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Preventive Medicine."

Jennifer McNeely, MD, MS is a general internist and Assistant Professor at the NYU School of Medicine. Dr. McNeely completed her residency training in Internal Medicine/Primary Care at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and came to NYU School of Medicine for a CDC-funded post-doctoral fellowship in Medicine and Public Health Research. In 2009 she joined the NYU faculty, in the Division of General Internal Medicine. Dr. McNeely’s research focuses on the implications of substance use for individuals and health systems, and on improving the identification and treatment of addiction in general medical settings. In 2010 she received a K23 career development award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIH/NIDA) and a Seed Grant from the NYU Center of Excellence on Addictions to study patient self-administered substance use screening in primary care settings. In 2011, she received a Pilot Project Grant from the NYU-HHC CTSI to extend this line of research into developing and validating a short drug screening tool. Dr. McNeely is also a clinician in the Adult Primary Care and Virology clinics at Bellevue Hospital.

Gbenga Ogedegbe is a Professor of Medicine and Director of the NYU Center for Healthful Behavior Change at New York University School of Medicine. After his internal medicine residency at Montefiore Medical Center, New York, he completed his fellowship training in Health Services Research and Clinical Epidemiology at Weill Medical College of Cornell University and then received his MPH from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Prior to his current position, Dr. Ogedegbe was a faculty member at both Cornell Weill Medical College and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Dr. Ogedegbe is one of the leading experts on healthcare disparities research, with a focus on implementing strategies to reduce disparities in cardiovascular diseases in minority populations. He has significant experience in the conduct of both observational studies and clinical trials of community-based interventions targeted cardiovascular risk reduction in African Americans; and especially focused on developing learning collaborative for primary care providers who deliver care in underserved-low-income neighborhoods.

Dr. Ogedegbe is either Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator on numerous NIH-funded projects and he has co-authored over 90 publications. Dr. Ogedegbe practices at the Bellevue Hospital Ambulatory Care Practice where he co-directs the Hypertension Specialty Clinic. He is a member of numerous scientific committees and expert panels of the National Institutes of Health including the 8th Joint National Committee on the Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Hypertension (JNC-8), which develops guidelines for the evaluation and treatment of hypertension. He was recently appointed to the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Living Well with Chronic Disease: Public Health Action to Reduce Disability and Improve Quality of Life. Dr. Ogedegbe is a Fellow of the American Heart Association, American Society of Hypertension, American College of Physicians and Academy of Behavioral Medicine. He currently serves as President of the New York Chapter of the American College of Physicians (Manhattan District).

Cheongeun Oh, PhD., is an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at the NYU School of Medicine. Her research interests include the development of mathematical, statistical, and computational methods to address scientific questions raised in molecular biology and genetics. She received her PhD. in applied mathematics and statistics from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook. She was previously a biostatistician in the Department of Preventive Medicine at SUNY Stony Brook and a postdoctoral associate in epidemiology and public health at Yale University.

Brendan Parent is an Instructor in the department of Population Health's division of Medical Ethics at New York University Langone Medical Center. He is also an affiliate of NYU's Sports and Society program, and Legal Fellow at the New York Task Force on Life and the Law, a government agency that assists the State with policy in medicine, law and ethics. His current research areas include Sports and Ethics, DNA forensics in the criminal justice system, and standards for revealing genetic information to patients and research participants. He designed his undergraduate major in Bioethics at University of California, Santa Cruz, and received his JD from Georgetown University Law Center where he was presented with the ABA Award for Excellence in Health Law.

Joseph Ravenell, MD, MS is Assistant Professor of Population Health and Medicine at NYU School of Medicine. He is a core member of the Center for Healthful Behavior Change, a board-certified internist and hypertension specialist with a strong track record of NIH funding to improve cardiovascular disease in diverse populations. He is Principle Investigator (PI) or co-PI of 3 community-based randomized trials: 1) a National Heart, Lung, Blood Institute R01 (1R01HL096946) grant to test community-based strategies to improve blood pressure control and colon cancer screening in 24 black churches in Harlem; 2) a National Institute for Minority Health and Health Disparities P60 project (1P60MD003421, Proj 2) to improve blood pressure control and cancer screening in black barbershops; and 3) a CDC-funded U48 grant (1U48 DP002671) to test the comparative effectiveness of two interventions to increase blood pressure control among black men in New York City.

Dr. Ravenell is a current recipient of the Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study a physician-level intervention to improve global cardiovascular risk in black men. He also received the American Heart Association Pharmaceutical Roundtable Career Development Award for Implementation Research for a project focused on improving guideline-concordant hypertension management among physicians within New York City’s municipal health system. He is co-PI of an NIA-funded RC4 grant to examine the impact of a behavioral economics intervention to improve adherence to clinical lipid-lowering guidelines among physicians in a New York City primary care practice. In parallel with developing unique expertise in multi-level cardiovascular and cancer research, Dr. Ravenell has become a leader in hypertension clinical care and training. He is certified as a Specialist in Clinical Hypertension by the American Society of Hypertension, and was elected as an inaugural Fellow of the American Society of Hypertension.

Dr. Ravenell co-founded the Bellevue Hospital Resistant Hypertension Program, and established the first NYU Hypertension and Lipidology Fellowship designed to train physicians in the management of high-risk hypertension and community-based behavioral cardiovascular research. Through research, clinical care and training, Dr. Ravenell continually cultivates a multi-level approach to improving cardiovascular disease and cancer-related population health.

Antoinette Schoenthaler, EdD is an Assistant Professor of Medicine. In 2008, she joined the faculty in the newly formed Center for Healthful Behavior Change at NYU School of Medicine as a behavioral scientist with an interest in understanding the mechanisms underlying racial disparities in cardiovascular health. Her research focuses on examining the reasons for patients’ decision to adhere to prescribed anti-hypertensive medications and lifestyle behaviors, with emphasis on psychosocial factors such as depression, self-efficacy, and intrinsic motivation. She has delivered over 450 motivational interviewing sessions within a study that aimed to improve medication adherence in African American patients with high blood pressure.

Currently, Dr. Schoenthaler leads motivational interviewing trainings and coaching sessions for community health workers and staff members as well as implements the treatment fidelity protocol to assess how well motivational interviewing is being delivered. In recognition of this work she was recently accepted as a motivational interviewing trainer by the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers (MINT), Inc Group. Recently, Antoinette was awarded an NHLBI K23 Patient-Oriented Career Development Awarded to examine the role patient-provider communication and racial composition of the patient-provider relationship has on medication adherence. She hopes to expand on this work in future grant applications by utilizing objective measures of communication and adherence to develop tailored interventions. In addition to her K23 grant, Dr. Schoenthaler recently submitted three grant applications as Principal Investigator to the AHA, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and an R21 application to the NHLBI. The objective of the AHA proposal is to evaluate the effect of a culturally tailored, practice-based adherence intervention (AI), delivered by trained Health Coaches versus usual care (UC) on medication adherence in high-risk Latino patients with uncontrolled HTN. The AHRQ proposal aims to evaluate the feasibility of implementing a Personal Health Record (PHR) system customized to support community-based blood pressure monitoring programs in two predominately Black churches in New York City. Finally, the R21 application will test the efficacy of an implementation intention (II) intervention that draws from established research on goal pursuit. The intervention will help Black patients achieve the goal of feeling self-efficacious to adhere to their medications after engaging in a primary care visit with their physician by treating perceived lack of trust in one’s physician as a barrier to achieving this focal goal.

Dr. Schoenthaler has worked in diverse settings from faith-based organizations and senior centers to community-based primary care practices, and most importantly, she has been involved in various programs targeted at cardiovascular risk reduction while she was at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Mark D. Schwartz, MD., FACP, is Associate Professor of Medicine at New York University (NYU) School of Medicine. After studying medicine at Cornell University and training in internal medicine at NYU, Dr. Schwartz was awarded a Bowen-Brooks Fellowship by the New York Academy of Medicine to study medical education innovation in Israel and Holland, and then completed a General Internal Medicine Fellowship at Duke University. At NYU he was selected as a Robert Wood Johnson Generalist Physician Faculty Scholar. He has been a primary care general internist in urban underserved settings for 25 years.

Dr. Schwartz has studied primary care workforce issues since the 1980’s and recently completed a national study of influences on student interest in internal medicine. His health services research focuses on how primary care workplace characteristics impact physician stress and burnout and, subsequently, quality of care and medical errors. He currently leads a Veterans Administration study of how panel management and clinical microsystem educational interventions for health professionals improve patient outcomes.

Since 1995, Dr. Schwartz has led NYU’s General Internal Medicine Fellowship Program and established its Master’s of Science in Medical Education program. He was founding Director of the educational core (Translational Research Education and Careers program) for NYU’s Clinical Translational Science Institute (CTSI). He directed NYU’s NIH Clinical Research Training Program and led its Master’s of Science in Clinical Investigation program. The Association of Clinical Research Training awarded him its Distinguished Research Educator award in 2008. Funded via the National Science Foundation, Dr. Schwartz leads an international Working Group of biologists, physicians, and educators to develop and test model curricula to infuse evolutionary biology into medical education.

In 2009-2010, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellow in Washington, DC, where he served on the professional staff of the Health Subcommittee of the Committee on Ways and Means in the US House of Representatives. Dr. Schwartz worked on negotiating, drafting, and passing the Affordable Care Act health care reform legislation along with various Medicare payment policy issues.

Dr. Yongzhao Shao is a tenured Professor of Biostatistics and Deputy Director of NYU Cancer Institute Biostatistics Shared Resources (BSR). Dr. Shao is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association for his contributions to the development of statistical methodology and applications to medical research. Besides conducting independent methodological research in statistics and supervising PhD. students, Dr. Shao is a co-investigator on a wide spectrum of NIH funded research projects. As an active member of the NYU Interdisciplinary Melanoma Cooperative Group (IMCG), Dr. Shao works with Drs. Hernando and Osman on altered microRNA expressions in melanoma brain metastasis funded by DOD, and with Dr. Polsky on blood-based detection of BRAF and NRAS DNA as biomarkers in stage III and IV metastatic melanoma funded by FDA.

Dr. Shao is also a co-investigator on the NCI funded International MPD Research Consortium to study genetic/genomic variants associated with Myeloproliferative Disorders, on the NCI funded study of prostate cancer racial disparity lead by Drs. Lee and Ostrer, and the NCI funded oral microbiome studies lead by Drs. Hayes and Pei, etc. Dr. Shao is also an active member of multiple environmental health related research teams and is currently the Co-Principal Investigator of a NIH/CDC funded project on longitudinal pulmonary study of NYU/Bellevue WTC environmental health cohort. Dr. Shao also participates in the NIEHS funded project to investigate the health impact of ambient particles PM2.5 in the air using the follow-up data of the large NIH/AARP cohort (PIs, Drs Hayes/Thurston). Dr. Shao has been collaborating with Dr. Reibman, Director of the NYU/Bellevue Asthma Registry, to study gene-environment interactions in asthmatics. In addition, Dr. Shao has been course directors of multiple graduate courses including Survival Analysis and Categorical Data Analysis offered at the NYU Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Dr Shao has been the biostatistics course director (C21 Content Director) for medical students at NYU School of Medicine.

Dr. Shelley is an Associate Professor of Medicine in the New York University School of Medicine with faculty appointments in the Colleges of Dentistry and Nursing. She received her medical degree from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City and her Masters degree from the Columbia School of Public Health. Dr. Shelley has had experience working in several sectors of the health system including in clinical, academic and public health settings. Her key areas of interest include smoking cessation in underserved populations, health care system changes to improve the quality of tobacco use treatment in a wide range of health care settings and more broadly, implementation and dissemination science. The consistent theme underlying her work is an interest in reducing health disparities by improving access to high quality care and evidence-based interventions among our most vulnerable populations. For eight years she has been Principal Investigator of a New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) funded grant (the Manhattan Tobacco Cessation Center) studying strategies for disseminating the Public Health Service Guideline on Treatment of Tobacco Use and Dependence in a wide range of urban health care settings.

Tanya Spruill is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Center for Healthful Behavior Change at New York University School of Medicine. She is a clinical health psychologist with expertise in cardiovascular behavioral medicine and clinical trials. She has experience developing and delivering behavioral interventions for a broad range of chronic disease populations, including hypertension, congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and chronic pain.

Dr. Spruill’s research focuses on the role of behavioral and psychosocial factors in the development and treatment of hypertension. She has a particular interest in prehypertension as a population for whom behavioral interventions may help to prevent progression to hypertension and reduce cardiovascular risk. She was awarded a Clinically Applied Research Grant from the American Heart Association to test the effects of a brief, telephone-based lifestyle intervention on blood pressure among prehypertensive patients. She will soon complete an NIH-funded Career Development Award (K23HL086734) in which she is conducting an experimental study of the effects of diagnostic labeling on blood pressure and quality of life among unaware prehypertensive patients.

Another area of Dr. Spruill’s work concerns the health effects of exposure to stress. She has collaborated on several laboratory-based studies of stress and is now building on this work to examine the effects of real-life stressful events and stress-related cognitions on sleep quality and blood pressure outside the laboratory using ecological momentary assessment (EMA) methodology. The goal of this work is to better understand the mechanisms by which stress contributes to hypertension to facilitate the development of new interventions to address this risk factor.

Nicholas Stine, MD, is the Associate Director of Healthcare Improvement at the New York City Health & Hospitals Corporation, the country’s largest municipal health system, where he develops and implements population health strategy to serve 1.3 million mostly Medicaid and uninsured patients. He is also an Attending Primary Care Physician at Bellevue Hospital and is a member of the faculty of the NYU School of Medicine in the Departments of Population Health and Medicine. Nick is board-certified in Internal Medicine, having completed medical school at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and residency at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Throughout his career, he has maintained active roles in public health and policy, including work as a staffer for Congressman Henry Waxman, policy advisor for Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, and as a member of the Obama Campaign Health Care Advisory Committee. Nick has published on the intersection between Medicine and Public Health in prominent journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association, and has clinical experience in Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Detroit, the Indian Health Service, Botswana and Haiti.

Glen Taksler, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow and Instructor in the Section on Value and Effectiveness (SOLVE). Dr. Taksler earned a PhD in Economics from Harvard University in 2002, after which he worked in finance. He later developed an interest in health care and began his transition into the field by examining racial disparities in prostate cancer mortality with researchers at Harvard University. Dr. Taksler’s research focuses on health economics, using large, observational data sets to draw inferences at a national level. Currently, he is researching preventive health care with Scott Braithwaite, calorie labeling with Brian Elbel, and continued work on disparities.

Chau Trinh-Shevrin, DrPH, is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Population Health and Medicine at the New York University (NYU) School of Medicine. Working with community partners in New York City and NYU colleagues, Dr. Trinh-Shevrin founded and established the NYU Center for the Study of Asian American Health (CSAAH) in 2003 as a P60 National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) Project EXPORT Center. For more than a decade, Dr. Trinh-Shevrin has served as CSAAH’s director and Research Core Principal Investigator, developing its scientific research agenda, and expanding national collaborations with academic, community and government partners serving the Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander populations. CSAAH has grown extensively to house a CDC-funded Health Promotion and Prevention Research Center, a REACH Center of Excellence to Eliminate Hepatitis B Disparities, and, in collaboration with the Asian and Pacific Islander American Health Forum, to co-implement Strategies to Reach and Implement the Vision of Health Equity Project. In 2009, CSAAH was the first academic recipient to receive the prestigious Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health’s Leadership Award for its contributions in addressing health disparities.

Currently, Dr. Trinh-Shevrin is Principal Investigator of a P60 NIH NIMHD Center of Excellence grant that supports CSAAH’s research infrastructure and is a co-investigator on several NIH and CDC-funded grants that aims to understand and reduce health disparities in Asian American and other underserved communities. Dr. Trinh-Shevrin is Director of Large Research Initiatives for the Department of Population Health, forging large research collaborations across NYU and with academic and community partners. Dr. Trinh-Shevrin also directs the Office of Community Engagement for the NYU-Health and Hospitals Corporation Clinical and Translational Science Institute, developing community-engaged research and research training initiatives.

Dr. Trinh-Shevrin is a social epidemiologist with a doctorate in public health from Columbia University and a masters in health policy and management at the State University of New York at Albany. Dr. Trinh-Shevrin currently serves on the board of directors for several community-based organizations and on the New York State’s Medicaid Redesign Team Health Disparities Workgroup. Dr. Trinh-Shevrin previously served four years on the board of directors for the Public Health Association of New York City. Dr. Trinh-Shevrin co-edited two textbooks Asian American Communities and Health (Jossey Bass Publishers, 2009) and Empowerment and Recovery: Confronting Addiction during Pregnancy with Peer Counseling (Praeger Press, 1998).

Dr. Zeleniuch-Jacquotte’s research focuses on hormones and women's health. She is the Principal Investigator of the New York University Women's Health Study (NYUWHS), a prospective cohort of over 14,000 women who donated blood between 1985 and 1991 and have been followed-up since to assess health outcomes, including cancer and cardiovascular disease. The cohort has been funded by the National Cancer Institute since its inception and led to over 150 publications. Based on this cohort, she has conducted studies showing that postmenopausal levels of endogenous estrogens and androgens are positively associated with risks of breast and endometrial cancers. They also showed that postmenopausal estrone levels are associated with an increased risk of colorectal cancer. Results of these studies underscore the importance for women to maintain a healthy weight as they age since, in postmenopausal women, estrogens are produced mostly in adipose tissue.

The NYUWHS is currently funded to assess the association of circulating vitamin D and related genes with risk of breast cancer, as well as the association of circulating folic acid with risk of breast cancer. The cohort also participates in a number of collaborative studies, including studies on diet and cancer and genome-wide association studies of non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma. She recently submitted a grant to identify proteomic markers of parity, which is known to result in a long-term protective effect against breast cancer. Finally, she is also interested in conducting studies to examine the potential for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to assess changes in the breast associated with hormonal exposures such as oral contraceptives in young women.

Dr. Zhong is an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at New York University School of Medicine. She has developed statistical approaches to correct the bias in odds ratios from genome-wide association (GWAS) studies and approaches that leverage information from genetics of gene expression studies to identify biological pathways enriched for expression-associated genetic loci associated with disease in GWAS results. She received her PhD. from the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Washington. Dr. Zhong has a demonstrated record of publications in developing novel statistical methods and has also collaborated on various scientific research projects. Her research interest is to develop powerful statistical methods for data generated from next generation sequencing technology and to use causal inference framework to integrate a diversity of molecular and clinical trait data to uncover models that predict complex system behavior.