💡 Introductions

Hi Everyone,

My name is Josh Mongillo and I am a Healthcare Associated Infections/Antibiotic Resistance Epidemiologist for the Utah Department of Health! I currently have my MPH and have worked mostly with healthcare associated infections during my public health career, specifically Multi-Drug Resistant Organisms (MDROs). We would like to gain data analysis experience and focus on ultimately creating a MDRO map via ArcGIS to track spread and burden of MDROs within Utah. I am looking forward to working with you all!

Josh

Hey Everyone! 

My name is Keeley Morris. I am a Senior Epidemiologist at the Minnesota Department of Health in the COVID-19 Epidemiology and Data Unit and my work primarily focuses on vaccine breakthrough. I've worked in public health for about 7 years, previously at the Texas Department of State Health Services and as a CDC ORISE Fellow. My focus has been largely on emerging and high consequence infectious diseases such as Ebola, Zika, pandemic influenza, and now COVID-19. I also have several years of experience working in public health emergency preparedness. I'm currently getting my PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Minnesota. 

Our project will be focused on synthesizing the extensive amount of data we collect on COVID-19 into a central, internal dashboard for use across our agency. I am particularly interested in improving my skills in building data visualizations using platforms such as Tableau and Microsoft Power BI. I look forward to hearing more about all of your projects and working with you through this program!

Keeley

Hello,

My name is Bhavana Srinivas. I'm an Informatics Specialist with Nebraska DHHS. I have a background in Informatics with 9 years of experience in different areas of Health IT. I recently started my career in Public Health. I'm very excited to be part of the training, looking forward to learning Data Science concepts and applying them along with my Informatics skills to assist in the project.  

Best,
Bhavana Srinivas

Hi everyone,

My name is Beth Gyllstrom. I'm one of the COVID Assistant Section Managers at the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH). I received my MPH and PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Minnesota and have worked in public health for 26 years. Before taking on my COVID response role, I was an epidemiologist in the MDH Center for Health Statistics, working with vital statistics data, BRFSS and PRAMS. I also spent several years conducting public health services and systems research studies related to the organization, financing and delivery of state and local public health services. A key interest of mine has focused on effectively presenting and communicating data to a variety of stakeholders. Our project is designed to better present and visualize COVID-19 data from multiple sources to create an internal dashboard. I have a strong interest in further developing data visualization skills and am excited to access the courses in this program. I look forward to getting to know you.

~Beth

Hello everyone, 

My name is Lifeng Li, the Cancer Epidemiologist at the Nebraska Cancer Registry of Nebraska DHHS. I've been working at DHHS for more than four years. My primary duties include utilizing the central cancer registry data to generate reports and infographics to reflect the cancer incidence, mortality, and survivorship in Nebraska and disseminate them to the internal and external public health organizations as well as the general public, fulfilling data requests, coordinating the projects with the national agencies on cancer reporting, etc. The main focus of our team project for the DSTT program is to use Natural Language Processing to automatically differentiate the reportability of cancer cases.  I'm eager to advance my knowledge in data science as well as data visualization. Look forward to knowing and learning from you all. 

lifeng 

Hello,

My name is Chris White and I’m an Epidemiologist at Public Health - Seattle & King County.  I’ve worked at the local public health department level for 5 years – first in the Metro Denver area focusing on Population Health and now for King County. My work the past 1.5 years has been on COVID - specifically data quality, analytics, molecular epi, and vaccine breakthroughs.

Our DSTT project involves the creation of a dashboard summarizing the health of persons living homeless. I’m interested to learn how to leverage cloud computing for this project and for future work.

Chris

Hello Everyone, my name is Maria Moskwa, MPH and I work as an epidemiology research associate at the Pennsylvania Department of Health, Division of Environmental Health Epidemiology, Bureau of Epidemiology. I primarily work with hospitalization and laboratory data and manage these data and perform analysis using SAS. I have been working at departments of health with similar responsibilities for about 8 years. I am interested in learning more data science skills and visualizations. I have built a dashboard in ArcGIS online displaying harmful algal blooms in Pennsylvania water bodies. I am interested in Powerbi and automating data processes, and learning more software coding and data management skills to automate and improve efficiency in data processes. (such as python and deep learning, AI) as well as learning what other tools are available and best suited for tasks. I am looking forward to sharing knowledge and working with everyone. 

Hello! My name is Qianru Wu, and I go by Amie. I am Cancer Registry Informatician at Nebraska DHHS. My work focuses on the electronic reporting of cancer data. I have been in my position for more than 3 years. I got MS in computer science, focusing on software development. I am also interested in data science and took some entry-level courses in this field. Before that, I was in a totally different area, which was meteorology, and earned my Ph.D. However, the work I did for my doctoral degree was all related to data analysis, so I did have some background in data science. 

I was brain storming solutions to automate the data flows in our registry as much as possible, and then this DSTT program came and provided a great opportunity to try something new. I am interested in exploring how data science, especially natural language processing (NLP) can assist us to automate data flow, make decisions, and increase efficiency. 

I am very happy to meet you all, and looking forward to sharing my knowledge and learning from you.
Qianru

Hi Everyone, my name is Benjamin Schram, and I'm an epidemiologist at the North Dakota Department of Health, Division of Disease Control.  I studied for my MPH at New York University before joining NDDoH 2 years ago.  I've gained significant experience in data science and programming through my work on data analysis, linkage, reporting, and management during the pandemic.  I currently serve as the Surveillance and Electronic Reporting System Coordinator, administering our Maven EDSS and working on ELR, ECR, RCKMS, MMGS, and all other Data Modernization Initiative projects.
I'm looking forward to gaining additional knowledge of Data Science with my team and learning how we can implement this knowledge to improve processes within our division.

Hi, everyone, my name is Han Liu, I am the GIS coordinator of Nebraska Department of Health for 3 years now.  I studied for my master of geographic information system at  University of Wisconsin before I moved to Nebraska. My primary duties include geospatial data management, cartography, spatial analysis, geoprocessing, and developing web application, dashboard, story map in ESRI's ArcGIS portal and Tableau environment. I am excited to learn and expand my skill and knowledge. Most interested in integrating Power BI and Natural Language Processing libraries to ESRI's technology. Looking forward to grow and share with our community:) 

Hello!  My name is Mageen Caines, and I am a Public Health Data Scientist/Epidemiologist with the Minneapolis Health Department.  My MPH is Community Health Promotion, BA in Sociology and History, and AA in Korean Language brought me to MHD, where I thrive in an environment that requires that we communicate local and hyper-local information to our extremely engaged community regularly and accurately.  My vision for this project is to build out our team's various interesting and important skillsets to a team that can fulfill what our internal and external partners need to make our data truly accessible as well as protect time for in-depth analysis and work.

I'm excited to learn and bubbling with enthusiasm - thanks for having us and looking forward to being in Class 2 together!  --mc2

Hello everyone, I'm Terri Hannibal, and I am a Nurse Consultant with the SC Department of Health and Environmental Control. I have been working in public health for less than a year, but I have been a nurse for 16 years. I have spent the last 9 years as an Infection Preventionist, so I am no stranger to how important data management is to the work that we do. Our team's goal is to create a system that allows us to seamlessly input data and turn that data in to useful information. We want to effectively improve communication between the multidisciplinary team that handles public health in SC. 

I am happy to be a part of the team and to be in this group. I look forward to this wonderful learning opportunity.

Hello everyone, 

My name is Yi Du, I'm an Epidemiologist/Data analyst at the Nebraska Injury Surveillance Office of Nebraska DHHS. I've been working at DHHS for more than five years. My primary duties include evaluating the data quality of the external cause of injury code (E-code) extracted from hospital discharge data, assessing the data quality of the emergency medical services (EMS), utilizing the hospital discharge data and vital records data (death certificates) to generate injury related reports, and fulfilling data requests, etc.  Since beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was highly involved in COVID-19 hospitalization and mortality surveillance. I received my MSPH degree 5 years ago. And I'm a PhD candidate in Epidemiology. The main focus of our team project for the DSTT program is to use Natural Language Processing to automatically differentiate the reportability of cancer cases.  I would like to learn more about data science as well as data visualization through this opportunity. I hope I would be able to apply what I learned in other areas, too. Look forward to discussing and learning with you all. 

Yi

Hi all!

My name is Elli Stier and I am an HAI epidemiologist with the Michigan DHHS! In my current role, my primary responsibility is to provide ongoing analysis of NHSN HAI data for Acute Care settings and SARS-CoV-2 data for long-term care facilities. A major component of this role is to generate HAI data for statewide quarterly, semi-annual, and annual reports. The topic of our teams project is modernizing our state’s major communicable disease public reporting from static PDF reports to dynamic and interactive data tools and/or dashboards. I am most excited to learn from this program ways to make reporting more useful and engaging in our state. 

Excited for the opportunity to be a part of DSTT Class 2! 

I am an Epi / ECR specialist at the TN Department of Health (TDH). My background is in nursing and informatics. My nursing career was mostly long-term vent care, but then I gravitated towards moving away from the bedside into Case Management and Utilization Management. I have always loved computers and workflows so I earned my Master's in Informatics which led me to be a Database Administrator/System Administrator for a Case Management program. I went on to get a BS in IT, and that gained me multiple certifications giving me a good foundation and understanding of Networking, Security, Linux, SQL, Web Design, and Python. I worked in the TN Public Health Lab as a clinical application coordinator on a LIMS upgrade. I have been working for more than a year in TDH to onboard facilities and bring eCR successfully into our surveillance system NBS. I also author the conditions on RCKMS. Part of my role is to develop methods for Data Quality and tracking eCRs. Our project is for enhancing both ELR and eCR routing, visualization, and alerting. I am looking forward to learning more about data science and visualizations. Working with XML, although my BS in IT gave me the basics, has proven to be an exciting challenge to see in action in the real world with it's complexities and difficulty in creating structure for the eCR.

Hello
I am the Overdose Data to Action Surveillance Coordinator in the Bureau of Substance Abuse at the IA Dept of Public Health.  I've been working in the Bureau of Substance Abuse for about 4 years. My primary responsibilities include gathering and evaluating the data from the ED plus the mortality and vital records data related to drug overdose, and using the data from the Prescription Monitoring Program (PMP) to fulfill various data requests.  As a member of the IDPH Syndromic Surveillance Champions group, I am learning and acquiring skills in syndromic surveillance and creating drug overdose alerts. The main focus of our team project for the DSTT program is to use the syndromic surveillance data to develop a data dashboard related to substance abuse. Through the DSTT opportunity, I am eager to learn more about data science as well as data visualization, and communicating surveillance data to various groups. Hopefully, I will be able to apply what I learn to other public health issues as well. I am particularly interested in improving my skills in building data visualizations using platforms such as Tableau and ESSENCE.

Hello everyone- I'm Liz Anderson, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the New York State Department of Health. I started here a little more than a year ago. Primarily, I am one of a team of people that handles enteric disease surveillance, but I am also involved with many aspects of the covid-19 pandemic response.

I'm very excited to learn more about data science, particularly Tableau and Python, and to interact with all of you!

Hello everyone,
I'm an epidemiologist within the viral hepatitis unit at the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, though my current duties primarily revolve around evaluating COVID-19 case investigation metrics. Previously, I also served at the department as an epi with our immunization registry, the Michigan Care Improvement Registry (MCIR). Like many of you, data visualizations and dashboards have grown to become a large part of my work life. Our projects aims to modernize and streamline our public communicable disease and immunizations reporting, hopefully with the use of these types of visualizations.  I'm excited to be a part of this program to gain more skills and insight into how we might accomplish this, as well as to see all the cool great work you all accomplish as well! Cheers!

Hi all! 

My name is Sarah Vannice and I obtained both my BA in Archaeology and my MSc in Epidemiology in Canada where I worked for 7 years researching the population health effects of substance use and addiction using mixed methods and community-based participatory research. My career has focused on evidence-based programs and policies to lessen the public health burden of harmful substance use and I am eager to learn more about how we can communicate the 'so what?" of the data. I am currently the Epidemiologist for the Bureau of Substance Abuse at the Iowa Department of Public Health and have been in Iowa for around 2 years now. Our team at IDPH is newly implementing syndromic surveillance, so we are interested in how we can meaningfully and efficiently communicate this more timely data. I am also really excited to learn from you all:)   

Hello Everyone,
I am the HAI Epidemiologist 2 within the Division of Acute Disease Epidemiology for the SC Department of Health and Environmental Control (SC DHEC). After graduating from GW with my MPH in epidemiology in 2018, I joined SC DHEC where I have worked with all things related to HAI (i.e., MDROs, AR/AS, NHSN reporting for all components, external hospital validation, and of course COVID-19). During the first year of the pandemic, I became a certified Infection Preventionist through CBIC and use those new skills to help with infection control assessments in all healthcare facilities in SC. I love what I do! Our team's goal is to create a data system that allows us to seamlessly input our state's HAI data and turn that data in to useful information to be shared with the public. I am very excited to learn more about data systems! 

Hello everyone! My name is Nathan Miller and I'm an Environmental Health Specialist with the Pennsylvania Department of Health, Division of Environmental Health Epidemiology. My work focuses on detecting, preventing, and controlling environmental health hazards, and involves close consultation with concerned or impacted citizens to provide them with the most applicable and up-to-date public health guidance specific to their situation. Although it feels like much longer, I have only been in the public health field for 2 years. Prior to this, I spent 7 years serving as a municipal code official and GIS technician for multiple municipalities in Northwestern PA. I earned a BA in Geography with a concentration in Urban and Regional Planning and a minor in GIS, and an AAS in Forest Technology. As a part of a current data science project, I built an environmental health indicators web app using ArcGIS Online to make PA environmental health data accessible to the public in an easy-to-understand way. One of the main focuses of our lead poisoning data linkage and mapping team project for the DSTT program will be creating an interactive ArcGIS Online web app to identify areas within PA that are at high risk for lead exposure. I am looking forward to learning more about data science, python, Tableau, and improving my overall skills at building data visualizations to better communicate public health information. I look forward to working and learning with all of you!

Hi everyone, nice to "meet" you all. My name is Kate Purcell and I am an epidemiologist in the Bureau of Communicable Disease Control for the New York State Department of Health. I have been in this role for 5 years, primarily focused on enteric disease surveillance and outbreak detection and response. 

I'm very excited to be a part of the DSTT class this year. We aim to take case data from our surveillance system for some enteric diseases and create maps in GIS with various exposures flagged in order to identify potential clusters to investigate.  I don't have an experience in GIS or Python which will be needed for this project, so eager to learn. 

Hi all! My name is Logan Downing and I'm an Epi 2 with Washington DOH's Data Science Support Unit.

My work with the agency is heavily focused on migrating our analytic workloads to the cloud and maintaining our negative covids diversion process (stood up to releive strain on our disease registry). I spend a lot of time day-to-day researching ways we can better leverage one of the analytic platforms we have available to us and the ways in which we can automate various workloads to reduce overall strain on the agency. I've built out a handful of tutorials for working in Databricks/Spark to assist folks in their migration to this new environment.

I originally came from an Atmospheric Science background (both my undergraduate and masters degree). My masters degree is where I pivoted to a more applied data science focus with my thesis focusing on the impacts rain intensity has on traffic speeds. I accepted a position with Indiana's Department of Health and then followed an opportunity out to Washington State about 6 months later. 

The project that I'm a part of is to develop a COVID-19 dashboard to identify and visualize outbreaks in high risk settings. I'm excited to see what opportunities our cloud infrastructure affords us to pull off a project of this scale in a way that produces little to no manual work for Epis here at Washington DOH. I'm also very excited to learn from the broad experiences that folks bring to this program!

Hi everyone, my name is Andrew Campf. I am an epidemiologist with the Washington State Department of Health.

Our project involves developing a dashboard to identify and visualize COVID-19 cases and outbreaks in high-risk correctional congregate settings in the state.

The project will make outbreak data more accessible and digestible for state, local, and tribal partners, and will prompt a quicker public health response when cases are detected. 

This is critical in correctional congregate settings, where COVID-19 transmission risk is high.

 

I am excited to be part of the DSTT program and look forward to putting my skills to work on this project! 

Hello Everyone-

My name is Scott Seys and I am an epidemiologist working on monitoring and investigation of COVID-19 variants at the Minnesota Department of Health. This includes cluster detection, monitoring and reporting variant trends, analyzing the representativeness of samples submitted for whole genome sequencing, and coordination of sample request data.

I am especially interested in learning how to best visualize variant information for Minnesota COVID-19 response and policy teams, so the DSTT program is a great opportunity to work on that goal with a small MDH team.

Hello! My name is Elyse Bevers and I am an Epidemiologist at the Washington State Department of Health. I work on COVID-19 outbreak responses in non-healthcare congregate settings and am the Legionella Coordinator for the state. I’ve worked in public health for seven years primarily working on healthcare-associated infections.  Our project will be to create a dashboard to summarize COVID-19 cases and outbreaks in correctional settings.  I am looking forward to learning new ways to automate data processes especially in Python and R.  I am looking forward to learning with you all!

Hello data science colleagues! I’m Lauren Gracy, an epidemiologist with the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. I’ve been with KDHE for two years, starting as an intern in infectious disease epidemiology while in my MPH program. Currently, my work is focused on suicide prevention program evaluation and analysis of suicide data. I am also involved in the Health Equity Action Team at my agency;  I’m passionate about using data to drive health equity work. I’ve utilized SAS for analytics, Tableau and ArcGIS for some data visualization, and Syndromic Surveillance for day-to-day monitoring and reporting. I am excited to be a part of this group and am here to learn all I can about the different aspects of data science. I am hoping to utilize the information we learn in machine learning and geospatial analysis to help my team create a tool to monitor emerging threats and identify vulnerable populations.

Greetings all -- I'm Paul Creswell. I'm the Wisconsin Occupational Health and Safety Senior Epidemiologist. I'm looking forward to expanding my skillset to assist my team in our project.  I'm also looking forward to interacting with others via the DSTT program!

Good morning, 

My name is Kevin Jian. I am a Communicable Disease Epidemiologist with Multnomah County Health Department. I work the gambit of communicable diseases doing case and outbreak investigation, public health surveillance, data analysis, and special studies. My recent work has been focused on COVID-19. This seems like a fantastic group of people and I am very excited to be working with you all!

Hi Everyone!

My name is Cody Schardin and I am a Research Analysis Specialist within the COVID-19 Epidemiology and Data Unit at the Minnesota Department of Health. I have been with the Minnesota Department of Health for just over 5 years. Prior to my role within the COVID Epi and Data Unit, I was a COVID-19 Case Investigation and Contact Tracing lead and before that, I worked within the Healthcare Associated Infections/Antimicrobial Resistance Section. In my current role, I help manage the COVID-19 whole genome sequencing data, assist epidemiologists with outbreak and cluster investigations, and help manage our COVID-19 database. I am interested in learning how to visualize whole genome sequencing data for our stakeholders and to learn how to integrate whole genome sequencing data and existing COVID-19 dashboards. I am very excited to be a part of the DSTT program! 

Hi all! My name is Lauren McKenzie and I am a Research Assistant on the Epidemiology, Research, and Evaluation team at the Minneapolis Health Department. My background is in Public Health with a concentration in Global Health. I recently started my work with the health department and prior to that I was working on an evidence-based research team at the VA Medical Center. With this project, our team is hoping to learn and expand on creative ways to display and share data. Looking forward to learning with all of you!

 
Lauren

Hi everyone! My name is Sixtine Gurrey.

I am an epidemiologist at the Washington State Department of Health (WADOH) Office of Communicable Disease Epidemiology. I am the COVID-19 corrections data lead on our non-healthcare congregate settings team, where I track all COVID-19 cases and outbreaks associated with correctional facilities in the state of Washington. I have been at WADOH since August 2020. Prior to this, I was a communications professional for 8 years. I have a Bachelor's degree in journalism and completed my MPH in Epidemiology in 2020.

Our DSTT project will create a dashboard to summarize and visualize COVID-19 cases and outbreaks in correctional settings, with the goal of expanding this dashboard to show other high-risk settings. I'm super excited that this project has facilitated my ability to meet, work with, and learn from colleagues across offices with exceptional data wrangling and dashboard skills. I'm looking forward to the DSTT program's training opportunities that will build on my data visualization and R skills, and gain some experience with data science project planning and management. 

It is amazing to see all the experience of those participating in this training program. I'm really looking forward to meeting you all.

Hi everyone! My name is Amy Bogucki and I'm an epidemiologist and the NEDSS Based System (NBS) coordinator at the TN Department of Health. I recently started in my role in December 2021 and previously I was an epidemiologist at the Florida Department of Health. I'm excited to meet everyone and work with my team in TN. I'm looking forward to learning new data science and informatics skills that I can implement in my new position with our project. Looking forward to working with everyone!

Good afternoon,

Nice to meet everyone.  My name is Madhu Anand and I have been an infectious disease epidemiologist for over 20 years.  I am currently the Deputy Director of our Regional Epidemiology and Investigations Program, but really love to "play" with enteric diseases.

Our DSTT project is looking at incorporating different layers of data in a GIS system to better detect and investigate potential clusters of enteric disease  Really looking forward to learning more data science and informatics skills that can help us look at our data in more novel ways.  Looking forward to this adventure with you all!

Hello everyone! My name is Camille Moreno and I am an Infectious Disease Epidemiologist at Delaware's Division of Public Health. I have been with DPH for 5 years, working primarily in a cross-cutting and mentoring role. For our DSTT project we would like to develop a process for improving disease reporting for providers and labs that are not HL7-compliant. This  will help us standardize disease reporting for  COVID-19 and other reportable conditions and will allow us to build stronger partnerships with providers.

Hello! My name is Gabe and I am the syndromic surveillance epidemiologist for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. My work with the agency has been focused on utilizing syndromic surveillance for everything from COVID-19 and infectious disease to injury and substance abuse to mental health. I am extremely familiar with ESSENCE query building and have helped lead efforts here in Kansas to engage emergency department staff with surveillance data. Prior to this position I served as public health liaison for a disaster response team responding to the Camp Fire. My MPH focus was actually in pubic health preparedness and I have an interest in disaster epidemiology. 

Our groups project will be a tool to automatically identify vulnerable populations for emerging health threats with syndromic data. We will hopefully be able to piggyback on our recent efforts to collect occupation and SDOH data, to identify who is most at risk for a emerging health threat (be it infections, suicide, overdose, etc.) at any given moment. Demographics, SDOH, Occupation, location, time, and even comorbid conditions are variables we hope to look at using our tool! I look forward to working with everyone and expanding my data science skill sets. 

Hi Everyone! My name is Kalyani McCullough and I am a Medical Officer on the COVID-19 Clinical Team at the California Dept of Public Health (CDPH). I am new to public health, going on 1 year in this current position. Previously I worked as a Primary Care Internist for Contra Costa County in CA.  I have a lot to learn in data science/analytics and am so excited to be part of this program. Our DSTT project is to create a dashboard for MIS-C (Multi-Inflammatory Syndrome in Children, a sequelae of infection with SARS CoV-2) so that we can provide real-time updates and dynamic displays of our data. 

Hi everyone. I'm Jason Geslois and I started in public health about 12 years ago in Louisiana where I worked at a community health center on chronic disease outreach and education as well as STI testing and counseling. Then I worked several years in Texas at a local health district doing infectious disease investigations on individual cases and multiple facility outbreaks on several diseases as well as leading the epi team for the jurisdiction's COVID-19 response. I'm now an Advanced Epidemiologist at Kansas Department of Health and Environment in the Immunizations Branch where I do projects on vaccine data analysis and collaborate with other departments also. 

I've used several data tools, but I value the ability to improve on each of them. For the program, I hope to learn more of the science within the machine learning framework to strengthen my knowledge in the more advanced statistical techniques for our goal in developing a better tool for identifying emerging health threats and the risk to vulnerable populations. I'm happy to work with my teammates to be able to enhance our organization's data capabilities and it's exciting to see the backgrounds of everyone here. I look forward to working with you all and learning from everyone. 

Julia  

Hi everyone,
My name is Julia Rubin and I am an Epidemiologist at the Sonoma County Department of Health Services in Northern CA. I am an infectious disease epidemiologist by training and have been focused largely on COVID-19 surveillance, collecting and disseminating information on outbreaks in high-risk communities such as schools, jails, homeless shelters. We collaborate closely with our community partners to ensure data quality, transparency, and health equity in our response efforts. I have previous project experience analyzing community antibiotic resistance as well as zoonotic disease transmission and global biosurveillance activities. I am looking forward to using this course to enhancing my skills in data analysis and visualization and become more proficient at R, ArcGIS, Tableau and Python so as to improve my capabilities in mapping, modeling, and molecular epidemiology.

Hi Everyone
My name is Sara Mader and I am the new electronic case reporting onboarding specialist for the state of WI.  My educational background is in biology and nursing, and I recently completed my Masters in Public Health.  I have been with WI DHS for a week now.  Prior to joining DHS I worked at a local public health department for Madison/Dane County in WI.  I worked for PHMDC for 15 years.  During that time I worked with communicable diseases specifically STI's and HIV.  I was the lead for our communicable disease (CD) team and came to DHS to be more deeply involved in the data side of CD's.  I am looking forward to learning more about data science and how to improve surveillance for the state of WI.  
Looking forward to learning from all the experienced members of this group.  
Sara 

Hello!
Marvin Smith, I am a data analyst with Injury Prevention Service of the Oklahoma State Department of Health. I have worked primarily with Oklahoma's Prescription Drug Monitoring Program over the last year. We use a variety of software solutions such as SAS, Microsoft SQL Server, Tableau, and others. We have a great team, committed to improving the health outcomes of our citizens using timely and meaningful data to inform and support health improvement initiatives across the state. We want to learn more effective ways of developing informative measures  and new strategies for disseminating the information in a timely manner. 

Hi all,
I'm June Bancroft, a Senior epidemiologist with Oregon Public Health Division. Very excited to bring more "science" to communicable disease surveillance data. Our main project is to build out an existing GIS application for cluster detection and identifying places with communicable disease pockets of need. We have a bare bones GIS application with basic descriptive epi fields but are moving our CD data to a new SQL data mart where additional lab/risk/exposure data will be available. Also interested in layering in social determinants of health.  I been with Oregon Public Health 24 years and am excited to have an opportunity to modernize my skill set with R, python and other ArcGIS tools for analysis. It's great to hear about everyone's projects  and I am looking forward to our collaborations over the next year. June

Hey everyone. 
My name is Robert Arsenault and I work at Arkansas Department of Health as an informatics epidemiologist. I have worked for ADH for about 3 months, so I am relatively new still. I have some educational background in mathematics and statistics as well as different programming languages such as a R, SPSS, Python, and SAS. I look forward to continuing to develop my skills in data science as well as my programming skills. 

Hi Everyone, My name is Chloe Le Marchand. I am a medical officer at the California department of public health working on MIS-C surveillance and school testing. I have been working at CDPH for the past 1.5 years. I have a masters in Global Health and am pretty comfortable with Stata but would love to learn R and improve my knowledge of data visualization.  

Hi everyone,

My name is Virgil Blu Jackson and I am the CDCF Public Health Analyst for Iowa.  I have been working in public health for nearly 3 years after receiving my masters of epidemiology from The University of Iowa in 2019.  I have experience with SAS,R,SQL and dashboard development.  I look forward to learning from the other members of the teams and am eager to develop my analysis skills.   

 Greetings from the Great State of Arkansas!  My name is Scott Alsbrook and I am GIS Analyst in the Informatics Section here at the Arkansas Department of Health.  I have been here for almost one year.  Primarily I work with the ESRI suite of products and python to automate those processes.  Recently, I have been getting into R and SAS and I am really excited about expanding my knowledge and involvement with our epidemiology staff and data science endeavors.

Greetings!  My name is Nicole Butt and I am an evaluator with Injury Prevention Service of the Oklahoma State Department of Health working with the Overdose to Action CDC Grant.  Although I’m fairly new to the great IPS team, I’ve been an evaluator in the substance abuse prevention field for nearly 20 years mainly working with American Indian Tribal Organizations.  I look forward to contributing to our project of creating a multi-layered drug overdose data dashboard and am always excited to increase my knowledge base.

Greetings, 
My name is Komi Modji and I am epidemiologist with the Bureau of Environmental and Occupational Health at the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. 
My work is focused on occupational health public health surveillance across industries and occupations. I am comfortable in R and a little bit in SAS and Python. I look forward to make more connections with other epidemiologists and data analysts.

Hello all,

My name is Scott Johnston and I am an epidemiologist with the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, where I'm the primary epi working on overdose and substance use data. I've been in this position for about 7 months and work a lot with syndromic data to look at emerging clusters of overdose, and notify local health departments. 

Previously I earned my MPH with a concentration in Epidemiology at the University of Kansas where I worked for the Kansas Cancer Registry. I also interned at a local health department as part of my MPH program where I worked on COVID-19 case investigation and helped develop and analyze a vaccine hesitancy survey. 

Nearly all of my analysis is currently in SAS, along with some temporal-spatial work using SaTScan, but I'm looking forward to learning more about geospatial analysis, machine learning, and SAS and/or R programming the year moves forward.

Hi Everyone,
Nice to "meet" you all! I work as a Clinical Epidemiologist for California Department of Public Health and have only been doing that for about 4 months. I just graduated with an MPH last month and am excited to learn more about data science programming, specifically in R. I look forward to learning and growing with all of you! Cheers to learning!

Hi All,

My name is Yanni Liang. I am one of the Occupational Health and Safety Epidemiologist from the Wisconsin team. I look forward to enhance my skills of using statistical packages and data visualization tools. I mainly use SAS and have some exposures to R and Python. Wish everyone a great learning experience! 

Good morning everyone! My name is Claire Nguyen and I am the Data and Evaluation Program Manager with the Injury Prevention Service at the Oklahoma State Department of Health. I've been with the IPS for 12 years, most of that time as an injury epidemiologist. Looking forward to expanding my knowledge of data science and data visualization. To date, overdose data from the IPS have been distributed via ad hoc data requests. We would like to create a dashboard to incorporate multiple types of substance use and overdose data. 

Donald  

Hello everyone,

My name is Donald McCormick and I am the Informatic Lead at the Arkansas Department of Health. I am very excited to participate in the Data Science Team Training Program. Our project revolves around the integration of our new Electronic Disease Surveillance System with non-disease registries. I have been with the Arkansas Department of Health for about 3.5 years and tried to focus on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of data analysis for our epidemiology program. My primary focus has been using SAS to transform and analyze data related to infectious disease, but look forward to learning Python and Rhapsody as we move into the eCR age.

Rebecca  

Hi everyone!  My name is Rebecca Walker, but I also go by Becky.  I am a nurse consultant/Infection Preventionist (IP) within the HAI Section at the South Carolina Department of Environmental Health and Control.  I have been doing infection prevention for twenty years, and certified since 2010.  I have mostly worked in the private sector until transitioning to public health in 2019 just before COVID.  Prior to COVID, a large portion of my work was focused on external validation of National Healthcare Safety Network Data and HAI outbreak response.  Since COVID, our team has been instrumental in assisting our nursing homes and other long-term care and congregate facilities with their COVID prevention and response efforts.  As we have a small but diverse team, I am looking forward to learning more about data science, particularly using the data we collect for action, particularly in a more efficient means.  

Hi everyone,
I'm Stephanie Hasanali. I have worked as a contract epidemiologist for the last 5 years at the Pennsylvania Department of Health, Division of Environmental Health Epidemiology. I like to say I'm a jack of all (public health) trades. I have helped win and now coordinate new grants, including EHC and Occupational Health Surveillance. I also manage the state's oil and natural gas production response effort. Before joining PADOH, I completed a PhD in Sociology and Demography with a minor in Health from Penn State.

I am most interested in learning Python (to code in ArcGIS) and Tableau/data visualizations. Looking forward to meeting and working with you all!

Hello everyone

I am a Sr. Public Health Researcher with the City of Minneapolis Health Department. I've been working in local public health for about 10 years now. In my current role, I support our department in conducting program evaluation across various health programs including our Office of Violence Prevention. 

I am very excited to be participating in this training program with my team, and am looking forward to building upon data visualization skills for purposes of our final project. 

Cheers!

Good morning everyone,

 

I’m Jamaica Dillard and for the past 2.5 years I’ve been an epidemiologist with the Arizona Department of Health Services’ Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program. I earned my MPH in Environmental and Occupational Health at the University of Arizona where my interest in data management & analysis and SAS programming began. I’m looking forward to expanding my knowledge in data visualization by learning how to create data dashboards that are accessible to external partner agencies.

Have a happy Friday!

Hello everybody and happy soon to be weekend! 

My name is Roee Reinberg and I am an epidemiologist with the Minneapolis Health Department. I have over 5 years experience with environmental epi, foodborne illness investigation, and infectious disease epidemiology. Looking forward to some good conversations and learning so we can help systematize our data for both internal and external stakeholders. 

Good luck everyone :-) 

Good afternoon everyone, and happy Friday. I am Amanda Bakken and for the past year I have been working as an epidemiologist with the North Dakota Department of Health. I work primarily with vectorborne diseases and rabies, but also help out in other areas. I received my MS in entomology from NCSU, and my MPH from UTHealth School of Public Health (Austin, TX). I'm looking forward to learning from everyone's experience, and helping my team with our own project.

Happy Friday! I am Dhawani Shah and I am an Epidemiologist at California Department of Public Health. I am a Dentist as well as a public health professional with 2 years of experience in clinical dental practice and 2 years of experience working in public health at the local and state level. I received my MPH from New York University, NY and have a lot of interest in developing my data analysis skills. I look forward to making new connections and learning from everyone's experiences.

Hi Everyone. 
I am Krista Davis and I have been an Epidemiology Research Associate in Childhood Lead Surveillance at the Pennsylvania Department of Health for 3 years. Prior to this I was a Program Analyst at PA DHS in Medicaid and have worked at several other state agencies. I received my MPH in Epidemiology from the University of Pittsburgh. I work mainly with SAS and ArcGIS. I'm looking forward to learning more about R and Python and data visualization and becoming more proficient with ArcGIS

Hi all,
I am Jenny Mercado and I have been an MCAH epidemiologist at Sonoma County Department of Health Services for the past 15 years.  I am looking forward to improving my skills in R (current SAS users), learning how to building and automate dashboards, and becoming better at data visualization.  Our team aims to create a dashboard to illustrate non-COVID health indicators that have been affected by the pandemic.

Hello everyone! My name is Hsini Lin and I'm a Deputy Office Chief for Environmental Epidemiology at the Arizona Department of Health Services. My background is in Environmental Toxicology, and I have 17 years of experience in public health. I'm interested in learning more about data science, data visualization, and expanding my data analysis skills.

Hi all! My name is Max Habicht, I'm an HAI Epidemiologist at the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (SC DHEC). I primarily work with NHSN data for LTCFs, SNFs, and ACHs for all things Covid-19 and HAIs. Currently, our group has all been using their unique skillsets on projects that are slightly different, yet very similar. So, the aim of our project is to create a a comprehensive platform where we can house all of our work and condense our different areas of work. Additionally, I'm just excited to learn from some data science experts and see what aspects of their work could possibly be implemented into our own.  

Good Luck! 

Hello everyone- 
I’m Naresh Bhandari, an epidemiologist in the Injury Prevention Service at the Oklahoma State Department of Health. I’ve been with the IPS for almost 5 years. I am mostly involved in drug overdose and fatal childhod injury surveillance. I’m very excited to be a part of this and looking forward to collaborating with you all. 
Thank you! 

Greetings! My name is Laura Cronquist. I have been an epidemiologist with the North Dakota Department of Health for seven years. I currently serve as the Enteric/Vectorborne/Zoonotic Disease Epidemiologist and the backup Respiratory Disease Epidemiologist. I am excited for this opportunity to expand my current data analysis skills, specifically with R. I am also looking forward to learning new data visualization techniques to make better use of our surveillance data, as well as networking with other data analysts and epidemiologists in various public health roles. 

Hello, my name is Kate Pack.  I manage the epidemiology team at the County of Sonoma Department of Health Services.  I earned my PhD in Human and Community Development at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.  I have worked in research and evaluation positions in educational, community, and public health settings for the past 16 years.  Our epidemiology team is interested in building a dashboard to track and communicate the non-COVID health impacts of the pandemic in our community.  I look forward to participating in the DSTT program to advance my statistical skills and learn new techniques for communicating data in effective and accessible ways. 

My name is Mel Solis and I am an internal medicine physician and public health medical officer at the California Department of Public Health (CDPH). While at CDPH, I have worked on COVID-19 reinfection and therapeutics, and MISC. I have also worked as a clinical consultant for the CDPH Hospitalizations team and helped design hospital burden scores, contribute to hospitalization data dashboard design, review hospital reporting requirements, and formulate after-action (post surge) plans for hospitals and state emergency response teams. I am excited to be part of the DSTT program and I am looking forward to learning about data analysis, dashboard design, and how to best use surveillance data to inform healthcare decision making.  

Hello! My name is Laurel Boyd and I'm an informaticist at the Oregon State Public Health Lab. I've worked here for just over a year. Prior to this, I worked on standing up ESSENCE/syndromic surveillance for Oregon as an epidemiologist/informaticist and then as a research analyst for EMS. I primarily work in R, SQL and GIS (R and ArcGIS) and have just begun playing with machine learning. I am hoping to support our project by learning how to optimize (my terrible) SQL queries, automating the use of machine learning to link across multiple data sources (e.g., epi/reportable disease and lab data) and building interactive mapping tools.

Hi everyone, I am Chrissy Radloff and I am a nurse infection preventionist and deputy program manager for the Healthcare Associated Infections / Antimicrobial Resistance Program at the Utah Department of Health (UDOH). I previously worked as a hospital float pool nurse working on med-surg, emergency department, cardiac stepdown, and inpatient psychiatry units. After receiving a masters in nursing informatics, I joined the informatics program at UDOH for one year focusing on data mapping, data standardization, and quality of healthcare data within a health information exchange database until for a potential source of data for surveillance. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I have worked on COVID-19 and multidrug resistant organism (MDRO) outbreak investigations and infection prevention and control for healthcare facilities with the HAI/AR program.  I hope to contribute my clinical, informatics, and infection prevention background to support our project on creating a dashboard to visualize MDRO cases, antibiotic use, and health equity data geographically throughout the state of Utah. Looking forward to learn from and collaborate with you all!

Hi everyone,
My name is Carmen Tirdea, I’m an Epidemiologist at Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS), Office of Environmental Health. I got my MPH from University of Arizona and I’ve been working at the ADHS for over three years. I work with different programs within the Office of Environmental Health including the Climate and Health Program, Environmental Public Health Tracking Program, and Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program. My main role includes supervising and planning program evaluation projects, designing, manipulating, and using databases for evaluation of health problems, and providing scientific and technical assistance to communities and outside partners.

My team’s project is to develop a public facing dashboard to Heat-Related Illness using syndromic surveillance data. We hope the dashboard will allow for effective coordination among public care systems to quickly inform interventions activities at the local level. 

 

Hi everyone, 
My name is Sukhesh Sudan and I am an Epidemiologist at Division of Immunization, Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS). I have been a part of public health efforts in Michigan since 2013 working on various projects aimed at improving people’s well-being, provider health, as well as preventing infections. In my current role, I produce various reports and dynamic maps using data from our immunization registry (MCIR) to depict the vaccination coverage at the county, ZIP code, as well as census tract level. 

Our team will be working on converting static reports into dynamic interactive dashboards for regularly updated data on reportable diseases and vaccinations across the State. In addition, the knowledge of open-source software like R and Python will equip me and the immunizations team with additional analytical and data visualization resources.

Hello everyone! I am Bhagwan Aggarwal working as Health Educator/Epidemiology Research Associate for the Environmental Health Epidemiology Division at the Pennsylvania Department of Health. I have more than 20 years of experience in academic, corporate, and public health. I'm here to expand my knowledge on utilization of the available public health data and my data analysis skills, and to learn more about data science and data visualization.

Hi everyone! 
I'm Steph Meyer and I've been an infectious disease epidemiologist for over 20 years. I'm currently the supervisor of our COVID Epidemiology and Data Unit at the Minnesota Department of Health, but I spent many years as a foodborne disease epi working on outbreak and cluster investigations. Our project is focused around creating a better internal dashboard and visualization tool for COVID. I'm hoping we can expand our team's Tableau knowledge and find ways to integrate all of our data sources more efficiently. Glad to "meet" all of you and look forward to working with you!

Hi all!
I'm Lorraine Twohey-Jacobs (she/her) and I work in Public Health-Seattle & King County's Community Health Services division as an epidemiologist and data administrator/project manager. I graduated with an MS in Epidemiology from the University of Washington in 2020, and jumped straight into COVID response at the county, primarily within the Health Care for the Homeless Network. I use R, SQL, and Tableau in my day-to-day work, where I lead projects related to dashboards and reporting for mobile vaccination, isolation and quarantine, homeless service site response, safety net patient outreach, and performance measurement.

Our project involves creating a dashboard to display health data related to people experiencing homelessness in the county. I look forward to learning strategies to visualize data and make information accessible to the populations we serve. Nice to meet you all!

Hi Everyone,

My name is Kayla Sankey (she/her) and I am an evaluator with the Substance Abuse Bureau at the Iowa Department of Public Health (IDPH). I have my MPH in Global Health and Epidemiology from the University of Colorado - Anschutz Medical College. I have worked at IDPH for about 2.5 years and my background/experience is in geospatial mapping, specifically working with ArcGIS and Tableau. 

Syndromic Surveillance is very new for our bureau so our project is focusing on how we can utilize the data to increase meaningful communication among our internal staff. I am looking forward to learning more about project management and data visualization!

Hi Everyone! My name is Dyanne Herrera-Vasquez. I’m an epidemiologist in the technical team in the MCH Epidemiology Unit at Texas Department of State Health Services. In my role I am involved in multiple projects within the unit related to infant health and children with special health care needs. I have a MPH in epidemiology and a PhD in Interdisciplinary health sciences. I’ve worked in public health for 11 years and was a former CSTE Applied Epidemiology fellow. In my past roles in Arizona and Tennessee, I’ve worked in grant writing, program evaluation, epidemiology surveillance and STD epidemiology. 

 

Our DSTT project is to design an interactive online dashboard to visualize MCH data for the state. I am excited to be part of this class and expand my knowledge of data visualization!

Hi everyone!

I'm Laura Fox and am a senior epidemiologist with the Environmental Public Health Tracking Program at Maricopa County Department of Public Health (MCDPH) and Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS). My public health origin story began in Texas, working as an infectious disease epidemiologist for Texas Department of Health Services Region 1 and then later food borne illness surveillance and outbreak investigation at Austin Public Health. I moved to Phoenix 3 years ago and have started work in the environmental health realm. I lead several data analysis, surveillance, and visualization projects and am hoping to expand skillset in data science to use R, SQL, and Tableau. 

I will be working with a great team at ADHS to develop a heat-related illness dashboard utilizing syndromic surveillance data. I’m excited to meet others in DSTT program with similar projects or experience! 

I am an Epidemiologist in the Foodborne Program at the TN Department of Health. I serve as TN’s FoodNet Coordinator and oversee FoodNet surveillance activities in TN. I received my MPH in Epidemiology and have worked in public health for over 20 years. Prior to my current role in the foodborne disease program, I worked in TN’s informatics program and as an Epidemiologist in one of our regional health departments. Before moving to TN, I worked as an Epidemiologist in the HAI Program for the Los Angeles County Health Department.  I look forward to learning new skills that I can implement in my current position and with our project.

Hi all, my name is Anne Schwindt, I'm a communicable disease nurse at the Multnomah County Health Department in Portland, OR. I've been with the county for about 7 years, 3 in my current position. I primarily work in case and outbreak investigation and am looking forward to our team's development of an enteric dashboard to help identify clusters and prevent disease spread in our community. 

Hi all - I’m Meaghan Fagalde (she/her) and I’m an epidemiologist at Public Health – Seattle & King County. I work on the Analytics and Informatics Team in the Communicable Disease Epidemiology and Immunization Section. Recently, I have been focusing on the informatics challenges related to COVID data. Our section is also responsible for surveillance of general communicable diseases (except for TB, HIV, and STDs); acute, chronic, and perinatal hepatitis; and immunization coverage. I’ve been with our section for 8 years, and before COVID I primarily worked on viral hepatitis surveillance. 

 

The COVID pandemic highlighted the need to modernize our data systems, and we’ve made significant progress towards streamlining our COVID-related data pipelines. Our team uses a mix of SAS, R, SQL, and Tableau in our daily work, and I’m interested in learning about other tools that might improve our processes. Our main DSTT project is enhance our understanding of persons experiencing homelessness in King County with our partners from Community Health Services. I’m so glad to have this opportunity to enhance our team’s technical skills and collaborate with you all! 

Hi all - I'm a nurse epidemiologist with the Communicable Disease team at Multnomah County Health Dept in Portland, OR. Our team is a mix of public health nurses and epidemiologists. Prior to COVID, I investigated reportable diseases and managed outbreaks of infectious diseases.  Currently, I'm doing a work out of class as the nursing supervisor and outbreak team supervisor for the COVID response team. I've been with the county for 5 years.

Our project is to build an integrated dashboard (Tableau) for bacterial enteric infections (Salmonella, Shigella, STEC). The dashboard will display near real-time epidemiological disease specific data including filterable epi curves, geography, case demographics, selected risk factors/exposures, as well as WGS data from NCBI. These data will assist in the investigation of disease trends or clustering. Looking forward to collaborating and learning from everyone here!

Hi all -- my name is Noel Silhan and I'm a communicable disease nurse at the Multnomah County Health Department in Portland, OR. I have been working with the county for 6 years and 2 years with communicable disease services managing an enhanced pertussis surveillance program.  I also do work in case and outbreak investigation and am looking forward to our team's development of an enteric dashboard to help identify outbreaks and reduce the spread of disease in our community. 

Hello, I am Markeith Pilot and I am a Department of Public Health epidemiologist with Seattle King County. I am a member of the Analytics and Informatics Team. Originally I am from California and have enjoyed the opportunity to help improve public health.
Here at King County, I have specifically worked with Covid-19, and my main project had been focused molecular epidemiology, tracking the variants and sequenced cases throughout the area. Constantly striving to improve the ways that we can provide clearer information to the public has been an excellent motivator.

I actually enjoy research project management about as much as I enjoy statistical analysis, and I am always eager to increase my skills in that area.
My first language was R and then I learned to use SAS and SQL. I look forward to strengthening my skills with Python. Beyond increasing my skills with Python, GIS and just more ideas and techniques for improved data visualization are always skills that I look forward to developing.

Greetings all. I am Scott Smith, epidemiologist for the Cook County Department of Public Health in Illinois. I'm also adjunct faculty at DePaul University where I teach classes on sustainable development and GIS analysis for public and environmental health.  I have a background in urban planning and public health (received my PhD in Planning, Policy and Design from the University of California, Irvine and Master of Environmental Planning and BS in Geography degrees from Arizona State University) and enjoy doing spatial and statistical analysis with R, GIS and Python. I'm looking forward to working with our project team and DSTT mentor to improve our data infrastructure, management and visualization capacities. One of our projects will be to design and deploy an online health atlas.

 Hello everyone! My name is Uche Njoku and I am an Information Systems Support Specialist at the Division of Public Health (DPH) in Delaware. I have been with DPH for 1 year and 2 months. My work is primarily focused toward maintaining and enhancing the electronic reporting of laboratory results and syndromic surveillance data across health systems. Our DSTT project is about enhancing the automation of disease reporting data that is transmitted through non-standard methods and my expectation is that we identify and gain opportunities and capacity to eliminate the manual involvement in our current process. I am looking forward to collaborating and working through this experience and learning some new things that will help the DPH team achieve our enhancement goal. 

I am very happy to meet you all and feel fortunate to be a part of this program.

Hi fellow DSTT learners!
My name is Marissa Taylor, I'm an epidemiologist employed by CDCF working in support of the U.S. Virgin Islands Department of Health. I lived in USVI 2019-2020 & now work remotely from Atlanta, GA.
Pre-COVID I have worked in vector-borne diseases, rabies, and leptospirosis. My main interests are zoonoses, emerging infectious diseases & spatial analyses. Since the emergence of COVID, my main role has been supervising our surveillance officer team.
For the DSTT, my divison (Epidemiology) is teaming up with the Communicable Disease Division to put our heads together to improve the public's access to STI information. We are hoping to make up to date dashboards of HIV data, and hopefully expand to other infectious diseases. I am looking forward to learing more about Tableau & data visualization tools in general.

Hi everyone!
My name is Thrishika Bala and I'm a vaccine-preventable disease surveillance and outbreak epidemiologist for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. I've been with the division for about 8 months and prior to this, I was wrapping up my MPH in Epidemiology from Tulane University.

My team's goal is to modernize our public communicable disease and immunizations reporting, to present them in a dynamic, interactive format. I'm excited to gain more skills to better analyze and present data, as well as to connect with and learn from all of you!

Good Morning Everyone,

My name is Tammy Helwich and I am a Management Analyst working with the Delaware Division of Public Health.  I have been a part of this division for over 6 years and in my current role, I have been working primarily with COVID lab reporting.  

I'm really excited to be a part of this and looking forward to working with everyone.  Our teams goal is to find new way to report COVID and all reportable diseases eliminating a lot of manual processes that we currently have in place.  

Good morning all! My name is Lucinda Hammond Gardner and I am an infectious disease epidemiologist in Sonoma County, California. I have worked in public health for almost 20 years and have witnessed an amazing transformation from paper/fax/mail reporting to automated online systems. I am so excited to dive in and take this even further. Our team is interested in creating a community health dashboard to monitor the widespread effect of the pandemic. Looking forward to working with you!

Hi All,

My name is Russell Barlow and I am an infectious disease epidemiologist with Multnomah County Health Department. My interests and training are in all things infectious diseases from the population to the molecular level.  During the COVID-19 pandemic I have had the opportunity of moving into big data including automating data processes, developing dynamic data visualizations, and designing and performing epidemiology special studies.  Outside of COVID-19, I have led the gamut of infectious disease outbreak investigations and have incorporated whole genome sequence (WGS) analyses to our enteric and TB. Our team will be working to build automated data structures and visualizations to integrate NCBI WGS data with our enteric surveillance (Shigella, STEC, Salmonella). The objective is to empower our diverse team to leverage these data in near-real time without having to navigate the complicated data structures and WGS workflows. We are excited to move this work forward and level up our teams data and epidemiology skills.

Happy Friday all!

I'm Rishi Kowalski, the opioid epidemiologist at the Cook County Department of Public Health, so I work with Scott, who introduced himself above! I work under the OD2A grant and I've been at CCDPH for a little over a year. I'm a heavy R user and have been since undergrad and I hold an ScM in Biostatistics. At CCDPH I've worked on maintaining standardized population files on Github, automating surveillance alerts and reports, as well as created an ShinyApp mapping overdose deaths in our jurisdiction, which I will shamelessly plug here! I'm looking forward to learning more about standardizing our data management and new techniques for approaching surveillance! Outside of work, I'm a big soccer fan and previously worked for the United States Soccer Federation.  

I'm Jade Hodge, a data analyst with Kansas Syndromic Surveillance Program for a year and a half now. I work to onboard KS ED and UC, as well as continuously improve data quality for the program. I use R daily and ESSENCE on a regular basis to look at Syndromic DQ, but would like to become more proficient at both. Our team is interested in social determinants of health.

My name is Levi Schlosser, I am an epidemiologist with the North Dakota Department of Health for the last three years. I currently serve as the Respiratory Disease Epidemiologist and Syndromic Surveillance Coordinator for the North Dakota Department of Health, and also serve as backup for our Enteric/Vectorborne/Zoonotic Disease Epidemiologist. I am excited for this opportunity to expand my current data analysis skills, specifically with utilizing R for syndromic surveillance. As our project looks to create a disease surveillance dashboard, I am also looking forward to learning new data visualization techniques to make our data more accessible and more useful for both the public and for internal decision making. 

Hi everyone,
I am Nhan Nguyen, an epidemiologist with the Cook County Department of Public Health (IL). I have been with the LHD for over five years and primarily focusing on non-communicable diseases through the use of datasets that include: vital records, hospitalization discharge, medical examiner mortality, youth risk surveys, and adult health surveys. A large aspect of my role beyond data management and analytics also includes development of GIS applications and maps. The main objective for the this DSTT project is to gain guidance on producing a public facing dashboard for all available data for all geographies in our jurisdiction. This is to assist external and internal stakeholders obtain accurate public health data in a timely manner. 

My name is Jahlise Francis, I am the Surveillance Coordinator the Communicable Disease Division at the Virgin Islands Department of Health. I have been with the VIDOH for 2 years. I started off as the Epidemiologist for the division working with just STIs data but then transitioned into the Surveillance Coordinator. My work primarily focuses on managing, coordinating, conducting, and monitoring the disease surveillance and investigation for STIs, HIV, and TB along with managing the grants associated with each infection. 

In conjunction with the Epidemiology Division here at DOH, we will be working on creating a dashboard that provides the public with STI and HIV data in an interactive way, improving of the accessibility of public health disease data. I am looking forward to strengthening my skills and learning new skills that will prove beneficial to our important work in Public Health. 

Good morning/afternoon, everyone, and Happy Groundhog Day!  I'm Scarlett and I'm the analytical epidemiologist for the HAI/AR program at the Utah Department of Health.  I was trained as a reproductive epidemiologist but transitioned almost 2 years ago to HAI and have since then mostly focused on tasks surrounding COVID. My main duties have been to manage, monitor, and analyze COVID outbreak data that we receive for all long-term care facilities in our state.

Our team's project is not COVID-related (breath of fresh air!).  We aim to use GIS mapping to improve geographical surveillance, analysis, early detection, and prediction of carbapenamase-producing/carbapenem-resistant orgranisms (CP-CRO) outbreaks. Our aim is to drive a coordinated, community-centered approach to prevent and respond to outbreaks by sharing a visual and interactive dashboard with Utah local health departments (LHDs) and healthcare facilities. We hope to use CP-CRO case-related data, our own Health Improvement Index Score (a health equity measure), and antibiotic prescribing data to complete our project.  We look forward to learning more about everyone's projects and can't wait to build collaborative relationships with you all!

Good afternoon everyone! I'm the Technical Team lead for Maternal & Child Health (MCH) Epidemiology at the Texas Department of State Health Services. I've been with the health department for 15 years as a demographer, Medicaid analyst, and MCH epidemiologist. In my roles I have used SAS, R, ArcGIS and many other analytic software packages. For a year and half I supported the State Epidemiologist in COVID-19 modeling.

Our team's project is to create a series of dashboards to monitor MCH indicators in Texas. These dashboards will be used be outside stakeholders and internally to track our progress.

Hi everyone, I’m Kelley and I’m an epidemiologist with the Cook County Department of Public Health. I’ve worked in applied epi, mostly in communicable disease, at the state and local level for 12 years. At CCDPH, I specialize in syndromic surveillance and do a lot of programming and analytic work across our CD programs (primarily in R). Currently, I’m responsible for our public COVID-19 data dashboard and other internal COVID-19 data products. I love using code and software to automate processes and make our work more efficient and effective. I’m excited to work on our DSTT project which involves both strengthening our internal data infrastructure and making our data more accessible to the public through an online health atlas.

Chris Nicholas, Information Specialist III for Maternal & Child Health (MCH) Epidemiology at the Texas Department of State Health Services. I primarily create data visualizations for our reports, using Illustrator and InDesign, and check our products for Brand Guide and accessibility compliance. I also made the first Tableau dashboard for MCH, which displays data from several years of PRAMS.

Greetings! My name is Jenisha Stapleton. I joined the Epidemiology Division of the Virgin Islands Department of Health as a COVID-19 Surveillance Officer in 2020. I recently started graduate studies in Public Health (MPH in Epi). I look forward to learning more about data science, especially data visualizations, foundational statistics, and programming. For the project, we will work to create a public-facing dashboard with STD/STI data.

Hi everyone! My name is Jenny Lenahan and I’m an epidemiologist with Public Health – Seattle & King County. During my three years in the department, my work has covered a broad scope, including COVID (of course!), general communicable diseases, viral hepatitis and syndromic surveillance. I routinely use SAS and Tableau for this work, and am hoping to expand my skills in R and SQL. Working across various communicable diseases (especially shigella, hepatitis A and COVID), has helped me to understand how vulnerable King County’s homeless population can be to these outbreaks. Our team’s main DSTT work will be to collaborate with our Community Health Services colleagues to improve our data systems and reporting surrounding communicable diseases among people experiencing homelessness. 

Good day everyone!

My name is Briana Lettsome and I am working as a COVID-19 Corps Surveillance Officer with the U.S. Virgin Islands Department of Health (VIDOH) through the CDC Foundation. I received a Master of Public Health from Columbia University and I have been working in public health for 7 months.

The focus of my team’s project is to create a sexually transmitted infections dashboard that would be easily accessible to internal and external stakeholders as well as to the public. Once established, we hope to expand the use of dashboards to reflect data from other divisions within the VIDOH.

Through the DSTT program, I am excited to have an opportunity to utilize my data analysis skills towards a public health project and I look forward to being introduced to other data science-related topics, such as Tableau.