Speaker:
Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Dissertation Defense
Abstract: Studies of human health have recently expanded to focus on the exposome paradigm, encompassing all exposures humans encounter from conception onward. However, source, measurement, and volume intricacies inherent to these data have constrained progression of statistical methods for key research questions. The central theme of this work is to develop and test statistical methodologies that can address the challenges of the complex relationships between environmental exposures, socioeconomic distress, and health outcomes. In this work, we explore three approaches to characterizing community health and its potential impact on several types of disease outcomes. In the first approach, we implement a latent class model to socioeconomic and comorbidities data and explore these classifications as fixed effects in an ecological spatial model of COVID-19 cases and deaths in NYC during two time periods of the pandemic. In the second, we use a non-parametric Bayesian approach to form socio-economic and pollution cluster profiles across US counties. We then use these profiles to inform a Bayesian spatial model on breast cancer mortality for data from 2014. In the final approach, we utilize a latent network model traditionally used in psychometrics research to explore structural racism. Using information from five domains previously used to measure discrimination (employment, education, housing, health, and criminal justice), we identify new variable domains to illustrate the complex manifestations of structural racism at the census tract level in Pennsylvania.
Zoom Conference: https://zoom.us
Meeting Number: 93863022808
Password: 885447