New faculty appointments
The RSPH appointed several faculty members in recent months.
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Solveig Argeseanu, assistant professor of global health, studies the social influences on child health. Her interests include relatives within the home environment, behavioral influences within social networks, demography and health, and child obesity. Prior to joining the faculty, Argeseanu was a postdoctoral fellow in global health epidemiology.
RSPH alumna Cam Escoffery is an assistant professor of behavioral sciences and health education specializing in cancer prevention and control, including tobacco control, program evaluation, web-based health promotion, and use of evidence-based public health strategies. She formerly was a clinical assistant professor with the RSPH.
Laura Gaydos, research assistant professor in health policy and management, also directs the department's MSPH program. Her research encompasses unintended pregnancy prevention/reproductive health, religion and reproductive health, women's fitness and nutrition, and racial disparities and legislative advocacy with regard to women's health.
Julie Gazmararian, associate professor of epidemiology, studies health literacy and reproductive health in underserved populations. She previously worked with the CDC and the USQA Center for Health Care Research with Aetna. The center is now based in the RSPH as the Emory Center on Health Outcomes and Quality. Formerly a research associate professor, Gazmararian leads a health literacy work group at Emory.
Ron Goetzel, research professor in health policy and management, wears two hats as director of Emory's Institute for Health and Productivity Studies and vice president of consulting and applied research for Thomson Reuters in Washington, D.C. He is the lead investigator for a New York City-based project supporting collaboration between private and public sectors in health promotion and disease prevention initiatives directed at employers, among multiple studies.
Pulak Ghosh, research associate professor in biostatistics, holds appointments in the RSPH and the Emory Winship Cancer Institute. He conducts research on Bayesian statistical methods in clinical trials, longitudinal data, and multivariate survival analysis and contributes expertise to the RSPH's growing team on statistical clinical trials.
Cardiologist Abhinov Goyal is an assistant professor of epidemiology and assistant professor of medicine. Through population research, Goyal explores the link between dysglycemia and cardiovascular disease. Most recently, he completed a fellowship at the Population Health Research Institute at McMaster University in Ontario.
Penelope Howards, assistant professor of epidemiology, specializes in reproductive health. She joined the RSPH after serving as a visiting scientist at the Danish Epidemiology Science Center at Aarhus University and as a postdoctoral fellow with the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Sean Kaufman, senior associate in epidemiology, is director of programs for the Center for Public Health Preparedness and Research. He currently directs a behavioral-based training program for staff working in high-containment laboratories. Kaufman previously served with the CDC, working directly with populations affected by infectious diseases, including anthrax, West Nile virus, and SARS.
Juan Leon was a postdoctoral fellow in the RSPH prior to becoming an assistant professor of global health. Among his research interests: infectious disease, immunology, enteric and foodborne diseases, diarrhea, norovirus, parasitology, and Chagas heart disease.
Saad Omer, assistant professor of global health, is a physician and epidemiologist specializing in vaccine-preventable diseases and HIV/AIDS. His research portfolio includes clinical trials to estimate the efficacy and/or immunogenicity of influenza, polio, measles, and pneumococcal vaccines; studies on the impact of spatial clustering of vaccine refusers; and clinical trials to reduce mother-to-child transmission of HIV in Africa. Omer comes to Emory from Johns Hopkins.
Justin Remais, assistant professor of environmental and occupational health, studies the spatial and temporal factors that propagate environmentally mediated tropical diseases. Key to his approach is linking models of environmental phenomena with mathematical models of disease transmission to answer fundamental questions about how diseases spread along environmental pathways.
Jessica Sales is a research assistant professor and recent postdoctoral fellow in behavioral sciences and health education. She is a coinvestigator on a randomized controlled trial to reduce decay of HIV-preventive behaviors among African American adolescent girls, a school-based flu vaccination program, and an HIV prevention program to strengthen family interaction and support early adolescent development.
An assistant professor of epidemiology, Anne Spaulding is a physician specializing in infectious and chronic disease epidemiology in correctional and drug-using populations. She has worked with the Rhode Island Department of Corrections, CDC's National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention and National Center for Infectious Diseases, and Georgia Correctional Health Care. Spaulding previously was a research assistant professor.
Matthew Strickland joined the RSPH as assistant professor of environmental and occupational health after serving with the CDC's National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. His interests include the epidemiology of congenital heart defects and associations between ambient air pollution and adverse pregnancy outcomes. Strickland also serves as assistant professor of epidemiology.
Patrick Sullivan, associate professor of epidemiology, is a veterinarian specializing in infectious diseases and vaccine development. He spent most of his career at the CDC, most recently as chief of the Behavior and Clinical Surveillance Branch, and also worked with the HIV Vaccine Trials Network at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Poul Thorsen, research professor of epidemiology, comes to Emory from the Institute of Public Health at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. His research encompasses prenatal risk factors, infectious causes of preterm delivery, low birth weight, autism, fetal neurologic development and alcohol consumption in pregnancy, and neurodevelopmental outcomes.
Kevin Ward, research associate professor of epidemiology, is an expert in cancer surveillance, registration, and control. He serves as deputy director of the Georgia Center for Cancer Statistics and as co-principal investigator of the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Registry in Metropolitan Atlanta. He received his MPH and PhD degrees from the RSPH.
Zhou Yang, assistant professor of health policy and management, comes to the RSPH from the University of Florida. Her research interests include the cost and efficacy of prescription drugs and the economic burden of chronic diseases. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Human Resources, Health Services Research, the Journal of Gerontology Social Science, and the American Journal of Managed Care.
