A candidate for the COH Health Data Visualization, Auralization, Haptics position is a Postdoctoral Associate of Public Health in the Department of Health Policy and Management at university school of public health. Their research focuses on resource allocation in health care and public health and the model-based evaluation of health policies. Their dissertation addresses issues of resource allocation during the COVID-19 pandemic and Ebola outbreaks, using simulation and stochastic optimization models to inform allocation decisions in real-time, while accounting for various sources of uncertainties in the future. They also work on multiple NSF-, NIH- and CDC- funded projects. The main objective of their current work is to develop decision models to project the long-term population impact and cost of different public health strategies to extend the lifespan of antibiotics. These models allow policymakers to translate data from surveillance systems of antimicrobial-resistant gonorrhea into evidence-based and cost-effective recommendations for the treatment of gonorrhea. They collaborates with several interdisciplinary teams around the world.

Job Talk: "At what prevalence of resistance should empiric antibiotic treatment for gonorrhea change? A cost-effectiveness analysis”
Common diagnostic tests for gonorrhea do not provide information about susceptibility to antibiotics. Guidelines recommend changing antibiotics used for empiric therapy once resistance prevalence exceeds 5%. This switch threshold determines the probability that a gonococcal infection is successfully treated with the first-line antibiotic and also determines the pace at which we switch to newer antibiotics. Yet, the evidence to support the commonly-used 5% switch threshold is not clear. We developed a transmission model of gonococcal infection with multiple resistance strata to project gonorrhea-associated costs and loss in quality-adjust life-years (QALYs) under different switch thresholds among men who have sex with men in the US. If new antibiotics are expected to become available every 10 years, choosing a lower switch threshold at 3% is expected to improve the population net health benefit (NHB). If in addition, drug susceptibility testing (DST) is also available to inform retreatment regimens when treatment with the first-line antibiotic is not successful, selecting 1% threshold is expected to maximize the population NHB. To determine the threshold of resistance prevalence to inform the first-line treatment of gonorrhea, policymakers should consider the pipeline of future antibiotics and the availability of DST.