USA TODAY - Epidemiologist Maureen Lichtveld said the most important lessons the nation continues to overlook from past disasters are rooted in preparedness investment and strengthening systems to increase community resilience. Those lessons, she said, could have been learned from past system and regulatory failures – from Hurricane Katrina’s devastation in New Orleans after years of neglecting the city's levee system to regulatory failures in F...
PITTWIRE - Elected officials, community members and University and industry leaders gathered on Hazelwood Green on Thursday to celebrate a major step forward for the regional life sciences industry: an agreement to form a 30-year strategic partnership between Pitt and biotech company ElevateBio to accelerate the development of highly innovative cell and gene therapies at Pitt BioForge .The Richard King Mellon Foundation announced a $100 million...
PITTWIRE - With over $1 million from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) Abdus Wahed, professor of biostatistics , and his team will launch a three-year project to develop methodological and statistical guidance for a new way of testing treatment sequences through adaptive and sequential clinical trials that better center patient needs and interests. Co-investigators on this project include Yu Cheng and Zhao Ren of t...
PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE - Now, more than ever, it is vital that public health takes the lead to counter health threats at every level of our common society — from continent to country, from state to county and from city to neighborhood. We know how to do this. Unfortunately, our recent efforts — often reactive — continue to fall short. Of greatest risk are our most vulnerable populations—the poor and disenfranchised.
THE CONVERSATION - IDM's Cristian Apetrei discusses the striking parallels between the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 pandemics that show the dire consequences disinformation can have on both patients and society as a whole. COVID-19 isn’t the first pandemic where false and harmful information has set back public health. What sets this pandemic apart, however, is the sheer magnitude of damaging disinformation put in circulation around the world. Data sho...
Karen Krymski recently received the Florida SBDC Network’s State Star Award at the Network’s Small Business Success Summit, held in Tampa on June 28. The award recognizes Krymski for her accomplishments in 2021. Only one State Star is awarded by the Network each year.
Krymski, who earned her MPH from Pitt Public Health in 1982, has been a member of the Florida SBDC at the University of South Florida team since 2015. She is a procurement sp...
WHYY - EOH's Dr. Bernard Goldstein weighs in on this study by researchers at Yale School of Public Health. He states, "It looks at a potential problem in ways that include new exposure metrics, which are really needed." Goldstein also says that though the factors that contribute to childhood leukemia are complex and still unclear, benzene is one known link. Dr. Goldstein has conducted prior research into exposures due to oil and gas wastewater i...
Mya Brady (EPI ‘21) knows the value of interprofessional education.Programs offered by three University of Pittsburgh schools, two academic departments and UPMC helped Brady, an infection preventionist at UPMC Presbyterian and Shadyside Hospitals, to find her perfect niche upon completion of her master’s degree.
Dean Maureen Lichtveld said a true “rebound” case means being infected with the same variant. “We know, for example, that with the coronavirus there are a number of variants,” Lichtveld said.
On this episode of Public Health America, Richard Garland discusses the national surge in gun violence and how it is a public health problem that requires public health intervention.
2022 Craig Award winner, Jeremy Martinson, is an assistant professor in the Department of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology (IDM), vice chair for research and program director of the Master of Public Health degree. “As a mentor, Dr. Martinson is extremely friendly and personable. He shows a genuine interest and cares for the well-being of students, and someone can talk to him about anything school or life-related. He is extremely knowledgeabl...
Congratulations to BIOSTAT’s Ying Ding who was selected as Health Sciences Ascending Star awardee! This honor was established to recognize highly productive, creative mid-career faculty members in the six Schools of the Health Sciences and is accompanied by $25,000 in research support. The inaugural group of awardees was selected from more than twenty outstanding nominees and sheds light on the tremendous breadth and depth of their scientific ac...
Douglas Landsittel (BIOS '97) is among a select group named to the distinction of American Statistical Association (ASA) Fellow. Landsittel is currently a professor and chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Indiana University School of Public Health - Bloomington. ASA Fellows are selected from hundreds of annual nominations. The association selects Fellows who—among other criteria—have participated in ASA initiatives, ...
PITTWIRE- To create Pitt’s Public Health Science Academy, take 10 teenagers from three Pittsburgh high schools, add 10 faculty mentors, mix with inspiration for four weeks and finish with possibly life-changing results.That’s the recipe that Dean Maureen Lichtveld crafted to attract more underrepresented students to the field, as well as to college itself.
Two departments will welcome new leaders in time for the fall semester. Mary Hawk has been appointed chair of the Department of Behavioral and Community Health Sciences and Yan Ma will lead the Department of Biostatistics. “We are excited to welcome these leaders,” said Dean Maureen Lichtveld. “They bring extensive research and teaching experience, compelling visions and effective management skills to their new roles.”
PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE - After a man in Rockland County, New York, became the first patient to contract polio in the U.S. in nearly a decade, experts such as IDM’s Peter Salk — whose late father, Jonas, developed a vaccine for the disease — said the public shouldn’t be alarmed but warned that children unvaccinated for polio could be at risk. “Polio is only a plane flight away,” Salk said. “Here is a circumstance that demonstrated that.”
NEXT PITTSBURGH - BCHS' Beth Hoffman and Jaime Sidani led a study, recently published in the Journal of Community Health, which highlights COVID-19 hesitancy, acceptance and promotion among health care workers. Partnering with scientists in the Department of Psychiatry they used Twitter analysis and health care worker surveys to gain insight regarding that hesitancy. Additional authors include BCHS' Kar-Hai Chu, Elizabeth Felter and MPH student,...
Congratulations to Jian Zou (BIOST '23) who was awarded the Mihaela Serban Award for best poster in the American Statistical Association (ASA) Pittsburgh Chapter's 2022 poster contest for his presentation "CGMM: an algorithm for constrained model-based clustering". Jian’s work is advised by Dr. George C. Tseng
Xiaoqing (Ellen) Tan (BIOST '22) received the Student Research Award at the 35th New England Statistics Symposium for her work "A Tree-based Model Averaging Approach for Personalized Treatment Effect Estimation from Heterogeneous Data Sources". This is the work that has recently been accepted to the Thirty-ninth International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML ’22), the leading international academic conference in machine learning.
PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE - EPI's Donald Burke discusses overdose deaths as an epidemic in Pittsburgh at bimonthly meeting for Allegheny County Board of Health. According to the data, last year saw an increase of 31 overdose deaths in the county, up to 719 from the 688 recorded in 2020.
Dr. Burke, dean emeritus of the School of Public Health and a member of the board, said that those figures track for exponential growth in overdose deaths in ...