The DBEI distinctively brings together expertise in biostatistics, epidemiology and informatics, to advance population-health science.
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4th Penn Conference on Big Data in Biomedical & Population Health Sciences
September 16-17, 2024 | Gaulton Auditorium/Lobby, Biomedical Research Building (421 Curie Boulevard, Philadelphia, PA)
Announcements
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July 1, 2024. The department is pleased to announce that Qi Long, PhD, Professor of Biostatistics, has been appointed as the new Vice Chair of Faculty Professional Development in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics (DBEI), effective July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2027.
In this essential role, Dr. Long will support the academic and professional growth of DBEI faculty members at all stages of their careers. His new responsibilities will include enhancing mentorship opportunities for junior faculty members; providing guidance on career advancement and tenure processes; identifying and allocating University resources to support professional development; and cultivating a collaborative research environment where every DBEI faculty member is empowered to reach their fullest potential.
Dr. Long will also partner with other DBEI leaders to foster diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging within the department through responsive recruitment and retention initiatives and paying particular attention to the career development of and unique challenges faced by faculty members from underrepresented groups.
The department would also like to thank Rebecca Hubbard, PhD, Dr. Long’s predecessor in this role, for her dedicated leadership and invaluable work during her appointment. Dr. Long assumes his new role as DBEI’s Vice Chair of Faculty Professional Development at an exciting time in the development of the department. Please join the department in congratulating him.
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July 1, 2024. Please join us in welcoming Jiayin Zheng, PhD as an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics to the department, effective July 1, 2024. Dr. Zheng earned a BS in Statistics from the Department of Mathematics at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China (2009) and a PhD in Statistics from the Department of Probability and Statistics at Peking University in Beijing, China (2015). He worked as a postdoctoral associate with Dr. Shein-Chung Chow at Duke University (2016-2017), and then as a postdoctoral research fellow with Dr. Li Hsu at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (2017-2019) before being appointed at a Staff Scientist in the Biostatistics Program in the Public Health Sciences Division there.
Dr. Zheng’s methodological research spans several innovative research areas including methods for data integration leveraging external summary information with internal individual data, bioequivalence and biosimilarity, risk prediction models, and survival analysis. He has published 26 peer-reviewed publications papers on statistical methodology and collaborative research (with nine as a first author or first co-author) in top tier journals including JASA, Biometrics, and Statistics in Medicine. He also served as a key biostatistician responsible for the statistical analysis of an original investigation published in JAMA.
Within the DBEI, Dr. Zheng will collaborate with investigators in the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the Perelman School of Medicine in areas such as neurology, cancer, infectious disease, and CHOP Clinical Futures, focusing on comparative effectiveness among other priorities. Dr. Zheng will also continue to develop statistical methods to address design and to analyze issues arising from these experimental and non-experimental study settings, particularly in the field of data integration. Additionally, he will contribute to the department’s education programs—instructing and advising students in the Biostatistics MS and PhD programs, and mentoring trainees and junior investigators.
In the News
Joel Gelfand, MD, the James J. Leyden, M.D. Endowed Professor in Clinical Investigation of Dermatology and Epidemiology, and colleagues at Penn found that adults and children with atopic dermatitis (AD) are more likely to develop inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) than their peers. In a new study published in the journal JAMA Dermatology, Dr. Gelfand and his team compared data from more than 409,000 children and 625,000 adults with atopic dermatitis and compared them to more than 1.8 million children and almost 2.7 million adults without the disease. Upon analysis, the scientists reported a “statistically significant” increased risk of incident or new-onset IBD among 44% of children and 34% of adults with atopic dermatitis, compared to the control groups.
"Less work has been done with atopic dermatitis, which is a very common skin disorder, and IBD. Both atopic dermatitis and IBD are diseases with barrier dysfunction, microbiome alterations, and chronic inflammation suggesting commonalities between the two diseases,” said Dr. Gelfand in a recent interview with Medical News Today. According to Dr. Gelfand, these findings are important for better understanding the health trajectories of people with atopic dermatitis.
Elizabeth Nesoff, PhD, MPH discusses her recently published study in the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI) blog investigating neighborhood features that were correlated with fatal opioid overdoses among the homeless population in New York City. Dr. Nesoff uses these discoveries to make important policy recommendations with respect to targeted outreach and other interventions.
Jeffrey Morris, PhD and Jeffrey Gerber, MD, PhD, MSCE collaborated with researchers to examine measles serostatus among pregnant persons about to give birth and whether rubella serostatus, which is routinely assessed during pregnancy, can serve as a proxy for measles serostatus.
About Us
To understand health and disease today, we need new thinking and novel science —the kind we create when multiple disciplines work together from the ground up. That is why this department has put forward a bold vision in population-health science: a single academic home for biostatistics, epidemiology and informatics.
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