News and Highlights
June 2009
New Grants
Heejung Bang, PhD, MS, Associate Professor of Biostatistics in Public Health, has been awarded a three-year grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute called “A Unified Approach of Cost-Effectiveness Analysis.” The main goal of this project is to develop a comprehensive approach for cost-effectiveness analysis and the associated computing software in a unified framework. We will evaluate the performance of our methods by extensive simulation and the utility of these methods in various practical settings, and also reanalyze existing datasets.
Linda Gerber, PhD, MA, Professor of Public Health and Epidemiology in Medicine, received a grant from the Qatar National Research Fund under the 2nd cycle of the National Priorities Research Program for her project titled “Study of Women’s Health in Qatar (SWIQ): Examining the physical, biological, psychological and social changes in women in their middle years.” Co-Investigators include Madhuvanti Murphy, DrPH, Assistant Professor of Public Health in the Division of Prevention and Health Behavior, and Heejung Bang, PhD, MS, Associate Professor of Biostatistics in Public Health. The study will be a national cross-sectional, epidemiologic two-phase study designed to examine the health of women in Qatar during their middle years. The study will examine the physical, biological, psychological and social changes during this transitional period. The goal of SWIQ’s research is to help scientists, health care providers and women learn how mid-life experiences affect health and quality of life during aging. The study will use similar questionnaires to those utilized in the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation (SWAN) in the United States.
Laith Abu-Raddad, PhD, Visiting Assistant Professor of Physics and Public Health at Weill Cornell Medical College/Qatar, has been awarded a grant in excess of $1 million from the Qatar National Research Fund titled “Role of biological co-factors in HIV epidemiology and impact of biomedical HIV prevention interventions.” This grant was also awarded under the 2nd cycle of Qatar’s National Priorities Research Program. The goals of the project are to conduct epidemiologic analyses and systematic reviews of the biological interaction between HIV and a number of non-sexually transmitted coinfections; to build a database of HIV plasma viral load measurements from all regions of the world, assess differences in viral load between regions, and determine whether higher levels of viral loads may have driven higher infectivity of African subjects; and to conduct mathematical modeling studies to quantify the epidemiologic impact on HIV of the synergy between HIV and biological cofactors including coinfections and assess the impact of interventions that target these biological cofactors.
Yuhua Bao, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Division of Health Policy, received an award from the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) for an R03 grant titled “Cost of an Evidence Based Depression Care Management Intervention in Home Health.” The award begins July 1, 2009.
Xi Kathy Zhou, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biostatistics in Public Health, received a two-year R21 award from the National Cancer Institute for her project, “Comprehensive Prognostic Modeling for Esophageal Cancer: A Bayesian Approach.” Co-investigators of this grant include Drs. Madhu Mazumdar, Heather Gold and Nasser Altorki from WCMC and Dr. Andrew Gelman from Columbia University.
