Faculty Directory

Elizabeth Shenkman, PhD is the Chair of the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics and also is the Co-Director of the University of Florida Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and the Associate Director for Community Outreach and Engagement for the UF Health Cancer Center. Dr. Shenkman is a health outcomes researcher with a research focus on: 1) determining which combinations of health care delivery, community, and patient factors influence quality and outcomes of care; and 2) developing and testing corresponding evidence-based strategies to reduce disparities in health outcomes among underserved populations.

In her role as CTSI Co-Director and Co-Principle Investigator, Dr. Shenkman leads the Learning Health System initiative, including interfacing with clinicians, health system leaders, researchers, and patients to align research and clinical operations to systematically improve health outcomes and advance health equity using real world data combined with implementation and improvement science methodologies. In addition, Dr. Shenkman leads the OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium, which was developed through the CTSI.

The Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute-funded OneFlorida Clinical Research Network is comprised of 10 different health system partners caring for over 15 M Floridians or approximately 60% of the population in the 3rd largest state in the US. The Floridians in this network include vulnerable populations who are rarely or minimally included in traditional clinical trials (e.g., those of lower socioeconomic status, racial and ethnic minorities, children, and older adults). A hallmark of OneFlorida is its centralized Data Trust, which contains linked health care claims, electronic health record, tumor registry, vital statistics, and census data from its health system partners for cohort discovery, study feasibility determination, and to augment primary data collection activities. Dr. Shenkman facilitates investigators’ access to OneFlorida clinical settings and the Data Trust for a wide range of studies including cancer-focused interventional trials.

Dr. Shenkman is an MPI for the NIH Office of the Director-funded All of Us Precision Medicine cohort initiative in collaboration with the University of Miami, Emory University and Morehouse School of Medicine. In that capacity, she is responsible for overseeing community engagement and recruitment and retention efforts focused on rural and underserved populations in North Florida. Dr. Shenkman also is the PI of an R01 funded by the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality examining the effects of telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals with chronic conditions. The project uses electronic health record data to better measure health care use and clinical outcomes for adults with T2 diabetes and/or hypertension and who have intersecting identities (e.g., women who are black and residing in rural areas).

Dr. Shenkman’s research is funded by PCORI, the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, NIH, and the National Cancer Institute. Her work is published in such journals as Pediatrics, Health Services Research, Clinical Epidemiology, Pediatric Blood and Cancer, and the American Journal of Public Health. Dr. Shenkman is an elected member of the Society for Pediatric Research and the American Pediatric Society.

Dr. Hogan is Director of the Division of Biomedical Informatics in the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics, Director of Biomedical Informatics for the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at the University of Florida, and Director of Informatics for the statewide OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium. He is the co-principal investigator on OneFlorida’s Clinical Data Research Network, which makes OneFlorida part of the National Patient Centered Clinical Research Network or PCORnet. OneFlorida is one of just 9 Clinical Research Networks in PCORnet 2.0 nationwide. Dr. Hogan is a Professor in the College of Medicine, Department of Health Outcomes and Policy at the University of Florida. To these endeavors, he brings over 20 years of experience in development and implementation of large informatics systems, electronic health records, healthcare data warehouses at three institutions and the OneFlorida Data Trust, the National Retail Data Monitor for biosurveillance, and a suite of research informatics applications used in the National Children’s Study. Dr. Hogan is an accomplished researcher and practitioner of biomedical informatics, with expertise and research interests in biomedical ontology and terminology, electronic health records, research informatics, and biosurveillance. He has authored over 60 journal publications and peer-reviewed papers at conferences and has been principal investigator or co-investigator on over $90M of grant funding.

Stephanie A. S. Staras, M.S.P.H., Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics and director of the department’s Division of Health Outcomes and Implementation Science. She is also a faculty member of the University of Florida’s Institute for Child Health Policy.

Dr. Staras is an expert in human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine implementation research. She has served as principal investigator on eight implementation research grants, including a 5-year, $2.9 million grant from the NCI in 2019 to evaluate a multi-level intervention to boost HPV vaccine rates among 11- and 12-year-olds in Florida. Dr. Staras’ work highlights the strong association between HPV vaccine initiation and parents’ beliefs about the HPV vaccine’s ability to prevent cancer safely. Additionally, she led one of a handful of studies to assess a direct link between provider recommendations and parent beliefs. By simultaneously targeting parents with reminders and providers with an in-clinic, parent-tailored decision aid, Dr. Staras’ real-world, multi-level implementation trial demonstrated a synergistic increase on HPV vaccine initiation among girls. To target interventions at geographic areas of the greatest need, Dr. Staras is characterizing HPV-related disease burden in the University of Florida Cancer Catchment Area by triangulating data with an environmental scan that includes vaccination records, stakeholder interviews, and a provider discrete choice experiment.

Dr. Staras is a graduate of the highly recognized Mentored Training in Dissemination and Implementation Research in Cancer program sponsored by the National Cancer Institute. Her excellence in research also was recognized by her inclusion in the University of Florida’s 2018-2019 University Term Professorship cohort. Dr. Staras also contributes her implementation science expertise to research grants on meningococcal B vaccination, smoking cessation, and cancer screenings.

Biomedical Informatics is an interdisciplinary field, where the central theme is to explore the effective uses of data, information, and knowledge for scientific inquiry, problem-solving, and decision making, motived by efforts to import human health. I have a diverse yet strong multi-disciplinary background in data integration, semantic web, machine learning, natural language processing, social media analysis, network science, data privacy, and software engineering. Nevertheless, my expertise and background serve an overarching theme: data science with heterogeneous data, information and knowledge resources.

I currently serve as the Chief Data Scientist for UF Health, Director of Cancer Informatics Shared Resource (and its eHealth Core program http://bit.ly/36IBw5s jointly supported by the UF CTSI), Associate Director of the Biomedical Informatics Program for the UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI; https://www.ctsi.ufl.edu/about/ctsi-programs/biomedical-informatics/), and the Chief Data Scientist for the OneFlorida+ Clinical Research Consortium (https://onefloridaconsortium.org/).

Dr. Gregory is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics.

Her research broadly examines individual, social, and organizational factors and conditions that impact health care safety and quality, with a particular focus on improving healthcare teamwork and patient care. Dr. Gregory also seeks to develop, implement and evaluate interventions, clinical informatics tools (including mHealth and telehealth), and educational programs (including simulation and virtual reality methods) to improve health care quality. As part of this work, she studies the development and validation of survey measures, and has developed and validated self-report measures around topics such as COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, organizational readiness to address diversity, and resident self-efficacy. She has served as Co-Investigator and Co-Principal Investigator on numerous funded projects, including from AHRQ, NIH, and Ohio Department of Medicaid grants and contracts. She is highly involved in the international Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), where she serves as Program Chair—Elect for the Health Care Technical Group and is on the Editorial Board for the Human Factors in Healthcare Journal.

Dr. Gregory holds a Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from the University of Central Florida, and completed an Advanced Fellowship in Health Professions Education, Evaluation and Research at the Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness & Safety with the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.

I have a multi-disciplinary background in the analysis of real-world data such as those from electronic health records (EHRs) and administrative claims, experimental and observational study design, predictive modeling (e.g., statistical and machine learning), causal modeling, and analysis of patient-reported outcomes. Together, my areas of expertise serve an overarching research theme: generating real-world evidence to support healthcare decision-making for disease prevention and control. Under this overarching theme, my research areas and expertise can be divided into three key methodologies: (1) EHR-based phenotyping and risk stratification – the identification of sub-populations with certain conditions or at higher risk for diseases, (2) Causal modeling and inference – the examination of causal relationships and pathways in clinical research, particularly treatment studies, and (3) Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) in clinical and public health applications – the development, validation, assessment, analysis, and reporting of PROs among various populations, especially vulnerable populations.

Dr. Kaufmann is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics (HOBI) at the University of Florida College of Medicine. He is a public health researcher with interests at the intersection of aging, sleep, and health services research. His research focuses on using epidemiologic data to identify patterns in use of health services for sleep disorders among older adults and examining how such patterns affect trajectories of aging (e.g., cognitive decline and neurodegeneration) across the life course.

Dominick Lemas is an assistant professor in the Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics at the University of Florida. Dr. Lemas received his bachelor’s degree in biology at the University of Vermont in 2006 and completed his doctorate in biochemistry & molecular biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2012. His research is devoted to understanding the fetal origins of pediatric obesity with a specific interest in the functional implications of gut microflora and the critical host-microbe interactions that regulate maternal-infant metabolism.

Dr. Manini is a Professor at UF’s College of Medicine in the Department of Aging and Geriatric Research. He is the Chief of the newly formed Division of Epidemiology and Data science in Gerontology (EDGE) and leads the Data Science and Applied Technology Core at the UF Claude D. Pepper Older American’s Independence Center. He is recognized for his work on the sarcopenia and dynapenia, frailty, activity epidemiology, and energy metabolism specifically focused in older adults. Recently, he has gained considerable recognition for his team science work on wearable mobile technology (e.g. smart watches) that will allow an unprecedented understanding of the exposome—environmental and behavioral exposures in the free-living world— and their impact on geriatric syndromes. He currently receives or has received support from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, National Cancer Institute and National Institute on Aging to conduct this work. At an international level, he has fellow status at two societies: The American College of Sports Medicine and The Gerontological Society of America (GSA). He is the Chair of the American College of Sports Medicine Strategic Health Initiative on Aging and he carried this leadership to the GSA where he served as the Co-Chair of the Measurement, Statistics, and Research Design (MSRD) Interest Group. He was a steering committee member of the Sarcopenia Definition and Outcomes Consortium that provided unprecedent new knowledge for defining sarcopenia for clinical use. He was also honored with being a standing member on NIH’s Center for Scientific Review as part of the Neurological, Aging and Musculoskeletal Epidemiology (NAME) Study Section. Lastly, he is serving as an Associated Editor of the Journals of Gerontology: Medical Sciences since 2020. He is an active mentor and teacher that strives to provide opportunities for the next generation of scientists. He was awarded in 2011 with the UF College of Medicine Exemplary Teachers Award and in 2018 he was recognized as a Master Mentor. He also graduated from the inaugural class of the UF’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute’s Academy of Research Excellence which emphasizes rigor and reproducibility. He is the principal investigator of a new National Institute on Aging training program called TRAM— Translational Research on Aging and Mobility. The training program is centered on mentoring trainees on translational research to preserve mobility in late-life. In his spare time, he enjoys spending time with his wife and trying to being a great father to his son and daughter. He is a perpetual learner always keeping busy not only as a scientist, but a handyman, devoted podcast listener, avid disc golfer, ball golfer, chess and billiards player, soccer coach, and Minecraft gamer.

Dr. Mardini is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics at the University of Florida (UF). He is a trained computer scientist and engineer with research expertise in applied artificial intelligence and wearable technology in healthcare

Professor Muller has external research funding from a variety of federal and state agencies. His more than 150 peer-reviewed journal publications are split roughly equally between scientific collaborations and biostatistical methodology developments. In addition, Professor Muller is the first author of two books on the theory and practice of linear models.

With funding from a series of NIH grants, Professor Muller serves as co-principal investigator in collaboration with Dr. D. H. Glueck (University of Colorado Denver Medical School) for the development of GLIMMPSE software and the website SampleSizeShop.org. The site includes a free online short course on design, power and sample size for studies with multilevel (clustering) and longitudinal dimensions. The site also includes free and open-source software, GLIMMPSE, that requires only a web browser to compute power and sample size for multilevel and longitudinal designs.

Dr. Ray is interested in how technology can support clinical and patient decision-making in the complex socio-technical healthcare delivery system. She brings expertise in leading observations in the clinical setting, qualitative interviews, physiologic measurement of stress and workload, complex system process improvement and design, and studying system impacts on human performance including decision making. She joins the University of Florida after four years as a faculty member in Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Emergency Medicine where she supported a variety of simulation educational programs and research in the areas of clinician stress, decision-support, and teams. Prior to returning to academia and research, she worked as a simulation learning consultant for Yale-New Haven Health where she facilitated interprofessional groups working on process improvement efforts across a variety of clinical settings including supporting simulation-based design sessions for the Yale Center for Healthcare Innovation, Redesign and Learning’s (CHIRAL) work on care transitions. During her graduate training, she worked as a graduate research fellow studying technology-based adaptive training methods for complex cognitive skill development. Dr. Ray has extensive experience in design facilitation, holds a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Certification, and is a TeamSTEPPS master instructor. Her current work focuses on how we can better understand and support clinician decision-making and patient-clinician interactions through informatics and technology-based interventions.

Dr. Yonghui Wu is an Associate Professor with Tenure in the College of Medicine, Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics at the University of Florida. He also serves as the Director of Natural Language Processing (NLP) at UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium. Dr. Wu’s research interests include natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, computational drug repurposing, and applications of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to electronic health records for clinical and translational research. He has published over 80 peer-reviewed papers and has been the principal investigator for grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute.

Dr. Wu received his Ph.D. from the Harbin Institute of Technology, School of Computer Science with a focus on natural language processing. Then, he entered medical informatics research with a motivation to help improve the quality of healthcare delivery and the safety of patients. He has Biomedical informatics training at Vanderbilt University and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

My research interests are machine learning, health informatics, and the intersection of both, with a particular focus on metric learning, federated learning, and privacy-preserving techniques.

Dr. Liu is an Associate Professor with Tenure in the College of Medicine, Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics (HOBI) at the University of Florida. She also serves as the Director of Predictive Analytics and Associate Director of Graduate Education in HOBI.

Dr. Liu received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Kansas and completed her National Library of Medicine (NLM) postdoctoral fellowship in biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt University. Her research interest in bioinformatics began during her doctoral study with the development of novel machine learning algorithms to improve prediction of protein-protein interactions and protein functions. Her research interest expanded to medical informatics while at Vanderbilt with the development of machine learning models to detect and predict adverse drug reactions using electronic health records (EHRs). Her other research interests include the secondary use of EHR data to model patient risks and disease trajectory and discover underlying risk factors.

Dr. Liu’s current research focus is on the development of novel machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to accelerate risk factor identification and discovery in medicine using EHR data. Clinical applications of her research include adverse drug reaction, diabetic kidney disease, acute kidney injury (AKI), and sepsis predictions. She is the Principal Investigator for a NIDDK R01 project and an NSF Smart and Connected Health project that focus on the identification of personalized risk factors of AKI with personalized modeling and causal learning and building a secure and robust AKI prediction model with privacy-preserving federated transfer learning using EHR data from 11 PCORnet sites across 9 states.

I am Professor and Director of Education for the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics. I also serve as Educational Liaison for the Cancer Control and Population Science Program for the UF Health Cancer Center. I am a behavioral scientist with international expertise in healthcare communication across the cancer continuum and in dementia. My research focuses on the development, implementation, and testing of communication interventions for clinicians, patients, and caregivers to improve health outcomes. I have been funded by the National Cancer Institute as Principal Investigator on 4 grants and Co-Investigator on 8 grants. In addition, I have received 13 grants from non-profit organizations including The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and the State of Florida. I have published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers and co-edited three Oxford books on healthcare communication and the Wiley International Encyclopedia of Health Communication. I am Editor-in-Chief of PEC Innovation and Associate Editor of Patient Education and Counseling.

I lead the department’s educational programs and am committed to ensuring that students receive training that will prepare them to help answer pressing health-related research questions. As an educator, I equip students with methodological skills that will enable them to pursue their research goals. As a mentor, my primary goal is to help my mentees fulfill their potential, recognizing that for each mentee this may differ considerably.

As a medical geographer, I contribute to a variety of health outcomes studies, and to the larger initiatives of the department and college. Due to my diverse background in spatial technologies and experience with environmental data, I contribute to a variety of community health and heath policy related research, both in geographic analyses and geographic data management. My research provides insight into the rurality and other spatial trends of patient data that is vital to several initiatives of the UF Cancer Center, Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute, several large Medicaid Managed Care evaluation projects, and multiple studies using data from the OneFlorida Clinical Data Research Network. My contributions include working with researchers on study design, managing the process of geocoding (generating spatial locations from written address data) multiple large data sources, analyses of health care network adequacy, hotspot identification, cluster analyses, and creation of new spatial data sets.

Georges Khalil is a cancer prevention scientist and health communication specialist in the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics. Prior to his appointment at the University of Florida, Dr. Khalil served as a Postdoctoral Fellow and then Instructor faculty at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He earned a Master of Public Health from the University of Southern California (2010) and a Doctoral degree in Communication from the State University of New York at Buffalo (2015).

Dr. Khalil’s research interests are cancer prevention, digital technologies, and social interactivity. His work primarily focuses on the design and evaluation of entertainment programs and technology-based interventions that aim to improve clinical and behavioral outcomes related to cancer prevention and control among youths. He is particularly passionate about the application of games for health to bring about behavior change.

Most recently, his research has focused on tobacco prevention, exploring adolescents’ reactions to ASPIRE, a web-based smoking prevention program, and the study of young adults’ experience with a mobile health campaign for tobacco-risk communication. He has also conducted studies on Re-Mission, a video game designed to improve medication adherence among pediatric cancer patients and cancer-risk communication among young-adult college students. Funded by an R00 grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Dr. Khalil is currently developing and testing social influence strategies for tobacco prevention and cessation among adolescents.

Dr. Khalil has presented at both national and international conferences including the World Cancer Congress and has been recipient of a variety of awards including the Early Career Investigator Award from the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco and a New Investigator Workshop Award from the American Society of Preventive Oncology.

Dr. LeLaurin is a faculty member in the Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics at the University of Florida College of Medicine and Assistant Director of the Learning Health System Initiative at the UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute. She has a background in implementation science and public health. She specializes in using qualitative and mixed-methods approaches to support implementation of technology-based interventions in clinical settings. Her current research focuses on social determinants of health and tobacco control.

Dr. Mkuu is a health outcomes and chronic disease researcher in the Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics at the University of Florida. Dr. Mkuu’s work focuses on disentangling determinants of health outcomes and identifying evidenced-interventions and policies that improve the health of under-served populations. Dr. Mkuu is also involved with leading evaluation projects that are part of the Texas Medicaid External Quality Review Organization.

Dr. Salloum is an associate professor in the Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics at the University of Florida College of Medicine and the director of the Learning Health System Initiative at the UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute. Salloum is a member of the UF Health Cancer Center and the Institute for Child Health Policy.

Dr. Salloum’s research focuses on the implementation and dissemination of evidence-based practices, especially in cancer prevention and control. He has a demonstrated research record in the area of health services research across diverse health system and policy settings, with a particular focus on the implementation of evidence-based programs. This work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, the Florida Department of Health, the International Development Research Centre, Cancer Research UK, and the CVS Foundation.

Dr. Salloum is well-versed in implementation science methods and frameworks and has served as faculty for the National Cancer Institute (NCI)’s Training Institute for Dissemination and Implementation Research in Cancer (TIDIRC). He is the recipient of two NCI-supported fellowships from the Health Care Systems Research Network (HCSRN)’s Cancer Research Network (CRN) Scholars Program (2015-2017); and the Mentored Training for Dissemination and Implementation Research in Cancer (MT-DIRC) Program (2016-2018).

Dr. Salloum teaches Fundamentals of Dissemination and Implementation Research (GMS 6851).

Dr. Khairul A Siddiqi, a health services researcher, has been working in the public health sector for more than five years in both developed and resource-poor health care settings. His current research focus is to assess the health care services, policies, and programs using both quantitative and qualitative research approaches with a view to increasing health care access and improving the quality of life of socially disadvantaged people, such as Medicaid beneficiaries, people living with HIV, older people with multimorbidity. He is currently working with different electronic health records (EHRs) and state and national databases to leverage the best use of secondary data in ending the HIV epidemic in Florida and the United States. His commitment to public health is studying how care is delivered, identifying opportunities for care improvement, and implementing new approaches for organizing and delivering health services.

Dr. Theis is an assistant professor in the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics and the Institute for Child Health Policy (ICHP) at the University of Florida College of Medicine. He is a medical anthropologist specializing in the use of qualitative methods in implementation and improvement science, health care quality measurement, and program evaluation. His research focuses on health disparities and health care quality in publicly insured populations, with an emphasis on children and adults in Medicaid who require long-term services and supports.

Dr. Theis presently oversees evaluation studies as a key investigator of the External Quality Review Organization for Texas Medicaid and CHIP. He also provides qualitative and mixed-methods expertise in collaboration with other UF faculty to inform the development and adoption of evidence-based practices in local clinical settings, including studies funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (PI: Shenkman), the James and Esther King Biomedical Research Program (PI: Salloum), and the Aetna Foundation (PI: Salloum). Dr. Theis is a member of the operations committee for the UF CTSI Learning Health System Program, and serves as a subject matter expert on Texas DSRIP Program workgroups related to social determinants of health and telehealth. Dr. Theis received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Florida. His dissertation work, funded by the U.S. Fulbright Program, used ethnographic methods to understand experiences and perceptions of discrimination among low-income social service users in Geneva, Switzerland.

W. Bruce Vogel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics at the University of Florida. An economist by training, Dr. Vogel has extensive experience in a broad array of health services research and health economics projects. His interests focus on applied mathematical and statistical modeling in the areas of outcomes, access, and costs across a variety of chronically-ill populations, including Medicaid enrollees, children, and veterans. Dr. Vogel is currently the lead principal investigator on a three-year, $3M evaluation of the Managed Medical Assistance (MMA) Program, Florida’s statewide transition of Medicaid from fee-for-service to managed care. He is also involved in conducting analyses as a part of the Texas Medicaid External Quality Review Organization. Dr. Vogel was previously Co-Director of the original Florida Health Insurance Study and also served as the Director of the Methodology Core at the VA Rehabilitation Outcomes Research Center and the VA Center for Innovation in Disability and Rehabilitation Research. He has served on the VA’s Scientific Merit Review Board and the VA’s National Advisory Panel on Statistics and Analytics, and is currently an Associate Editor of BMC Health Services Research. His research has appeared in Medical Care, Health Services Research, Inquiry, Health Care Management Science, and Advances in Health Economics and Health Services Research, among others. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the George Washington University.

Dr. Young is a biocultural anthropologist with a background in global and environmental health. She is a faculty member in the Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics (HOBI) and the Institute for Child Health Policy (ICHP), a member of the Emerging Pathogens Institute (EPI), and a faculty affiliate in the Center for African Studies and the Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research at UF.

Dr. Young has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Arizona and more than 15 years of global health research and teaching experience in the US and sub-Saharan Africa. Her research focuses on identifying the social and structural factors contributing to environmental and maternal health disparities and strengthening access to health and environmental services in vulnerable and underserved populations. As a mentor and educator, Dr. Young advocates for promoting equity in team science, evidence-based education practices in public health, and active, person-centered teaching practices that help equip health professionals with the skills needed to promote global and environmental health in the COVID-19 era.

At HOBI, Dr. Young applies her expertise in ecosocial epidemiology, community-based participatory approaches, and implementation science research as an Assistant Scientist, designing and overseeing evaluation projects for the external quality review organization (EQRO) for Texas Medicaid and CHIP.

Jonathan Shuster is a professor emeritus in the College of Medicine, Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics, and Director of Research Design and Analysis Program, University of Florida Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

He has been on the University of Florida faculty since 1969. Between 1980 and 2000, he served as the founding Group Statistician for the Pediatric Oncology Group, one of the cooperative clinical trials groups funded by the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health (NIH). He has been PI or Co-PI on over $30 million in federal grants. He is a member of the Cardiovascular and Sleep Epidemiology Study Section for the NIH, his fifth term on an NIH study section. He is also a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Sequential Analysis. In past years, he has served as Associate Editor, Journal of the American Statistical Association and on the Editorial Board of Blood.

Dr. Wagenaar is Professor Emeritus of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics at the University of Florida College of Medicine. His second book, Public Health Law Research: Theory and Methods (with Scott Burris of Temple University School of Law), was published by Wiley in 2013. In addition, he has published 200 scientific articles on social and behavioral epidemiology, public health policy, legal evaluations, community intervention trials, alcohol and tobacco studies, traffic safety, injury control, and, most recently, effects of family economic security policies on infant and child health outcomes.

In 1987, Professor Wagenaar received the Exceptional Leadership Award from the American Public Health Association. In 1999, he received the Jellinek Award for lifetime achievement in research on alcohol. In 2001 he received the Innovator’s Award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and in 2004 was named by the Institute for Scientific Information as a Highly Cited Researcher, an honor limited to less than one-half of one percent of published scientists worldwide. Other scientists have cited his journal articles more than 10,000 times. In 2009 he received the Prevention Science Award and in 2016 the Nan Tobler Award, both from the Society for Prevention Research, in recognition of his three decades of investigating and advancing the methods and outcomes of prevention research.