In the month
of March, two Epidemiology PhD students successfully defended their dissertations. On Friday, March 13th, Xingdi Hu successfully defended his dissertation titled Alcohol Treatment Use in HIV-Infected Individuals with Hazardous Drinking: Utilization, Drinking Outcomes, and Survival. Xingdi’s college career has been at the University of Florida and he is now determining his next steps. Taj Azarian defended his dissertation on Monday, March 23rd. His dissertation is titled Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus Transmission: A Genomic and Ecological Approach to Unraveling the Epidemiology of Antibiotic Resistant Pathogens. Taj has accepted a post-doctoral Fellowship at the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard School of Public Health. We are very excited for them and looking forward to what they will accomplish in the future.