my cv, my google scholar, my NIH bibliography, my ORCiD, my github, my johns hopkins faculty page

Last Updated: 2024-06-13

I am an Assistant Scientist in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Department of Biostatistics. As an assistant scientist, I serve as a core faculty member of the Center on Aging and Health (COAH), as a team member of the Accelerometry Resource Core (ARC), and as a consultant in the Biostatistics Center.

Broadly, my work has aimed to leverage wearable sensor data in large cohort studies to unravel the roles physical activity, sedentary behavior, and sleep play in aging and multi-morbidity. As a part of the Accelerometry Research Core, I work in interdisciplinary teams of clinicians, epidemiologists, and engineers to deploy wearable sensors in clinical studies, including the National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS), the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA), the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Neurocognitive Study (ARIC-NCS), and more. We train study staff, monitor data quality and protocol adherence, extract meaningful measures from the complex digitized signals, and aide researchers in how to use these measures and interpret their results.

My work in the Accelerometry Resource Core also includes developing and validating novel measures and methods for wearable sensors. In my work with the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study, I developed novel methodologies for utilizing accelerometers on-board ECG patches to characterize posture and sedentary behavior in the free-living environment. This work enabled cardiologists with the Multicenter Aids Cohort Study (MACS) to better understand differences in day-to-day heart rhythms between men living with and without HIV. In my work with the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Neurocognitive Study (ARIC-NCS), I worked with Dr. Davoudi to validate the same accelerometer for characterizing activity intensity and to estimate activity intensity cut-points for adults in very late life. These methodologies have benefited other work with the ARIC-NCS, in which my collaborators have studied relationships between activity and dementia incidence.

More recently, I have expanded my focus into analyzing smartphone based temporal activity diaries from parent-child dyads for the “Innovations to Generate Estimates of Children’s Soil/Dust Intake” Study (INGEST). This project has not only expanded my area of work to a different population (i.e., children) and medium of data collection (i.e., complex electronic surveys) but also challenged me to consider how the environemental context of physical activities can be a key exposure of interest in public health research beyond my prior focus on amounts or intensities of physical activity.

Mentors and Collaborators

I am an assistant scientist at the Johns Hopkins Center on Aging and Health where I work with Dr. Jennifer Schrack and Dr. Adam Spira as a part of the Accelerometry Reasearch Core (ARC).

I recently completed my postdoctoral fellowship with the Epidemiology and Biostatistics of Aging Training Program, and I received my PhD in Biostatistics from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, under the guidance of Ciprian Crainiceanu and the WIT research group. As a part of my dissertation research, I also worked with Dr. Colantuoni to model recurrent delirium events in the ICU. These models are now implemented in frailtypack.

My Roots

As an undergraduate at St. Olaf College, I studied Math, Statistics, and Environmental Studies. I was a fellow in the Center for Interdisciplinary Research , I assisted with research at the Cannon River Watershed Partnership (now called Clean River Partners ), and I was a junior fellow at the Joint Program in Survey Methodology when I assisted with questionnaire design at the National Agrigultural Statistics Service. As an undergraduate at Saint Olaf College, I got to be a part of an innovative course designed by Paul Roback and Julie Legler.