Epidemiology & Biostatistics

Elena Andresen, PhD, MA, BA (email: andresen@phhp.ufl.edu)
Professor and Chair, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics
(352) 273-5359
HPNP, Room 3107

Elena M. Andresen, Ph.D., is Professor and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Florida’s College of Public Heath and Health Professions. Dr. Andresen received her Ph.D. in epidemiology in 1991 from the University of Washington, Seattle. She also trained in health services research and was a pre-doctoral HSR&D fellow at the Seattle VA Medical Center. Her training and research interests include chronic disease epidemiology among older adults, disability epidemiology, and outcomes research in rehabilitation and disability. Dr. Andresen has special expertise in research methods and measures in research related to older adults and groups with disability, including psychometric testing and refinement of health related quality of life and disability instruments. She was a member of the Institute of Medicine committee to develop an agenda for health outcomes research for elderly people (1996), and the IOM committee on “The Future of Disability in America.” Her current funding includes testing a surveillance measure of caregiving and caregiver burden for national use, as well as projects related to disability, caregiving, and aging funded by the CDC, NIDRR, the VA HSR&D, and the NIA. Dr. Andresen is a member of the American College of Epidemiology (elected 1993), the American Public Health Association (Epidemiology & Medical Care sections, Disability SPIG), the International Society for Quality of Life Research, and the Society for Epidemiologic Research.

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Nabih R. Asal, PhD, FACE (email: asal@phhp.ufl.edu)
Professor
(352) 273-5363
HPNP, Room 3110

Dr. Asal holds a BS in Chemistry from William Jewell College, an MS in Epidemiology from the University of Missouri, and a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Oklahoma and specializes in cancer.. He is a Fellow of the American College of Epidemiology. He joined the University of Florida on July 1, 2002, to help organize and develop the Master of Public Health Epidemiology Track. He is also the Associate Director for the Advanced Post Graduate Program in Clinical Investigation (APPCI) at the Health Sciences Center. For most of his professional career, he was a faculty at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center College of Public Health where he was a David Ross Boyd Professor and Chair, Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology (1990-1999).

Dr. Asal is an experienced epidemiologist with a track record in the planning, design, execution, and analysis of data from large scale peer-reviewed epidemiological studies funded by the National Institute of Health, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the American Cancer Society, the Department of Defense and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including several grants funded by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. He has had one year of service as a Senior Epidemiologist in the Division of Cancer Prevention and Control at the CDC and two and a half years at the Morehouse School of Medicine.

Dr. Asal’s current research activities focus on understanding and eliminating disparities in cancer between racial/ethnic groups and include two large scale case-control studies that investigate: 1) the relationship between obesity, nutrition and renal cell carcinoma in blacks and whites (funded by the American Cancer Society) and 2) the impact of prostate cancer screening on mortality in black and white men (funded by the Department of Defense).

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Robert L. Cook, MD, MPH (email: cookrl@phhp.ufl.edu)
Associate Professor
(352) 273-5869
HPNP, Room 3114

Robert L. Cook is Associate Professor of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Medicine, and Associate Director of the Florida Center for Medicaid and the Uninsured. He received his MD and MPH in Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1991. After completing residency training in Internal Medicine at the University of Virginia, he completed a two-year fellowship in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program and then joined the Faculty at the University of Pittsburgh, where he has held joint appointments in the Departments of Medicine and Behavioral and Community Health Sciences (1996 – 2006).

Dr. Cook’s research has focused primarily on prevention issues involving HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. His NIH-funded research studies include an investigation of the relationship of alcohol and drug use patterns to STD outcomes in young persons, a clinical trial investigating the impact of home screening for gonorrhea and chlamydia, and a study of immune response in persons infected with influenza and the West Nile Virus. He recently received funding to serve as Protocol Chair on a clinical trial to investigate whether screening and treatment of bacterial vaginosis can reduce the incidence of STDs in young women.

His current research interests include 1) interventions to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, including those that target substance abuse; 2) clinical and health services research related to HIV infection; and 3) research to address health issues in uninsured and underserved populations.

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Amy Dailey, PhD, MPhil, MPH, BS (email:abdailey@phhp.ufl.edu)
Assistant Professor
(352) 273-5934
HPNP, Room 3111

Amy B. Dailey is Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the College of Public Health and Health Professions. She received her doctoral training in chronic disease epidemiology at Yale University and her MPH from Tulane University. Her research interests include racial/ethnic disparities in health outcomes, methods in social epidemiology, and women’s health. Her most recent work, funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, has focused on the influence of neighborhood-level socioeconomic status and perceived racial discrimination on non-adherence to mammography screening guidelines. She also has applied epidemiology experience as a research assistant, study manager, and county health department epidemiologist.

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Erin DeFries Bouldin (email: edefries@phhp.ufl.edu)
Lecturer
(352) 273-5279
HPNP, Room 3102

Erin DeFries Bouldin is a Lecturer in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the College of Public Health and Health Professions. She received her MPH in Epidemiology from the University of Florida in 2006. She has worked on projects evaluating the relationship between Florida's Healthy Start Prenatal Risk Screen and infant mortality, and the impact of nutrition facts availability on middle school students' food choices. Currently, her works focuses on the health impacts of caregiving and improving the health and quality of life of Floridians with disability through the Florida Office on Disability and Health. She teaches Introduction to Public Health with Dr. Andresen.

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Xiaohui Xu, PhD, MPH, MD (email: xhxu@phhp.ufl.edu)
Assistant Professor
(352) 273-5362
HPNP, Room 3116

Xiaohui Xu is an Assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, College of Public Health and Health Professions at the University of Florida. He received his Ph.D in Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh in 2007 and Master degree in Environmental Health at the Fudan University in 1999. His primary research focuses on the influence of environmental exposures on human health and application of spatial analysis tools such as ArcGIS in disease mapping, exposure assessment and risk analysis.

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Michael J Daniels, ScD (email: daniels@phhp.ufl.edu)
Professor, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics; Acting Chair, Department of Statistics (CLAS)
(352) 273-1845

Mike Daniels received his Sc.D. in Biostatistics from Harvard in 1995. He spent two years in the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University in a visiting position and then the next five years at Iowa State University as an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics. He came to the University of Florida in 2002 as an associate professor in the Department of Statistics. In 2006, he became the Chief of the Division of Biostatistics in the College of Pubic Health and Health Professions and he currently holds a joint appointment between the Department of Statistics (in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences) and the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics (in the College of Public Health and Health Professions).

Mike is on the Executive Committee on the Institute of Aging at the University of Florida and also is the leader of its Biostatistics Core. In general, his research interests focus on Bayesian metholodogy. He has done considerable work on the development of models for (incomplete) longitudinal data, paying special attention to the dependence structure. He has also worked on problems in environmental epidemiology (health effects of air pollution) and modelling of a pollutant process over space and time.

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Amy Cantrell, Ph.D. (email: acantrell@phhp.ufl.edu)
Research Assistant Professor
HPNP, Room 3117

Amy Cantrell is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the College of Public Health and Health Professions. She is originally from South Carolina where she earned a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Science in Mathematics from Winthrop University in Rock Hill, SC. In 1996, she enrolled at the University of Florida and received her Ph.D. in Statistics in 2001. She began working at Central Florida Community College in 1999 where she was employed until August 2007. She teaches a variety of statistics courses each term. Her experience and interest are in statistical consulting and in educating students and professionals from other backgrounds on the use of statistics.

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Babette Brumback, PhD, MA, BS (email: brumback@phhp.ufl.edu)
Associate Professor and Interim Director, Biostatistics Program
(352) 273-5366
HPNP, Room 3112
http://www.phhp.ufl.edu/~brumback

Babette Brumback received her Ph.D. in Statistics in 1996 from the University of California, Berkley, followed by postdoctoral training in Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the Harvard school of Public Health. She was on the Biostatistics faculty at the University of Washington, Seattle, and then at the University of California, Los Angeles, before joining the department of Health Services Research, Management, and Policy of the College of Public Health and Health Professions at the University of Florida in Summer of 2004 as Associate Professor of Biostatistics. Her statistical research has concentrated on methods for longitudinal data analysis, coarsened data problems, and casual modeling. She has also collaborated on public health and medical studies in the areas of reproductive epidemiology, cancer epidemiology, infectious disease epidemiology, community health, and clinical trials in children's oncology.

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Ning Li, Ph.D. (email: nli@phhp.ufl.edu)
Assistant Professor
HPNP, Room 3115
(352) 273-5822

Ning Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, College of Public Health and Health Professions. She received her Ph.D. in Biostatistics from the University of California at Los Angeles in 2005, and then she worked as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Biomathematics, UCLA School of Medicine. Her research has focused on missing data in longitudinal analysis and joint modeling of longitudinal and survival data. She has also worked on problems in statistical genetics.

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Xiaomin Lu, Ph.D., M.S., M.A., B.S. (email: xlu2@phhp.ufl.edu)
Assistant Professor
(352) 273-7920
HPNP, Room 3109
http://www.phhp.ufl.edu/~xlu2

Xiaomin Lu is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, College of Public Health and Health Professions at the University of Florida. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Statistics at North Carolina State University in 2007 under the direction of Anastasios A.Tsiatis. Her primary research focuses on clinical trials, censored survival analysis, semiparametric methods with missing and censored data, longitudinal data analysis and causal inference.

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