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Epidemiology
PHD
4 Years
Email this Student
United States
I attended New York University with majors in neuroscience and English and American literature, and a minor in computer science. To even out my one-sided education, I trained to be a sexual health peer educator, and enjoyed teaching sorority girls about contraceptive methods.
Itching to get out of New York, I moved to Southern California to work as an outreach coordinator at a few small college campuses. At an adult extension course, I discovered epidemiology, and how I could make people squirm by talking about genital herpes. I soon found myself at University of California at Berkeley, learning about infectious diseases and epidemiologic methods. I had an internship at the Calif. state health department, and wrote my master's thesis on mathematical models of HIV vaccines.
With my MPH and biostatistics skills, I started my practice of public health at a reproductive health non-profit. I served as the data analyst for Northern California on a CDC-funded Chlamydia surveillance project (the Infertility Prevention Project) and helped to plan/manage/evaluate additional off-site Chlamydia screening projects.
In my four years at JHSPH, I have taken a variety of courses, ranging from immunology and infectious diseases to course on survey methodology and social epidemiology.
I completed the data collection portion of my dissertation research as part of the BESURE study (www.besure.info) heterosexual cycle about two years ago. I am interested in the impact of incarceration on sexual behavior norms and STD/HIV infection. On the BESURE behavioral surveillance questionnaire, we tried to measure normative beliefs about sexual concurrency. We believe that higher levels of incarceration in a neighborhood may encourage higher risk sexual behaviors among the men and women still living in the community, contributing to the high rates of HIV/AIDS seen in Baltimore.
I was able to work with the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services to access information about incarceration at the zip code level. Several methodological challenges in my work remain, including how to use zip code-level data in a census tract-level analysis.
I plan to begin a post-doctoral position at a federal agency in the fall working on health survey research methods.
Though my first visit to Baltimore was during Hurricane Isabele, I still knew that Baltimore was the place for me. Baltimore has some of the highest STD rates in the country--and some of the finest research groups to study STDs are here at Hopkins. I've been working with faculty at the Center for STD Research Prevention and Training (www.jhsph.edu/std) for four years, and I know that their mentoring and guidance will be pivotal in my career search.
Last updated 7/12/2009 10:30 AM
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