Drew A. Westmoreland, MSPH, Ph.D., joined us on August 1, 2022, from the Institute for Implementation Science in Population Health at CUNY School of Public Health and Health Policy. Dr. Westmoreland is a sexual health researcher drawing heavily on behavioral, social, and infectious disease epidemiology. Her research interests include HIV and STI epidemiology, behavior associated with increased vulnerability to and acquisition of HIV and other STIs, innovative uses of technology in epidemiologic research to engage vulnerable populations, applied network analysis in sexual health research and interventions, and emerging public health crises (e.g., COVID-19). Dr. Westmoreland’s NIAAA-funded K01 research focuses on the impact of alcohol consumption on daily HIV PrEP adherence.

Ashley Malin, Ph.D., joined us on August 1, 2022, from the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. Her research examines potential impacts of fluoride, metals, and nutrition on neurodevelopment and neuroendocrine outcomes.

Shantrel Canidate, MPH, Ph.D., started her tenure track on August 1, 2022. She is a social and behavioral scientist and health disparities researcher with applied experience in HIV outreach to marginal populations and clinical studies related to substance use disorders (SUDs) and HIV. Her primary research focuses on applying an interdisciplinary approach to identifying, understanding, and addressing health disparities in HIV among Black men who have sex with men (MSM) in the South. She is currently funded through the first-ever Health Equity Research Scholars for Action (HES4A) grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In this work, she is examining how syndemic factors (e.g., alcohol and depression) and social network factors interact to influence HIV care continuum (HCC) outcomes (e.g., adherence, retention in care, and viral suppression) among Black MSM in Florida.

Simone Marini, Ph.D., started his tenure track on August 1, 2022. His research focuses on the artificial intelligence applied to biology and medicine. He is particularly interested in data integration, i.e., in developing models by harvesting heterogeneous data from genomics, proteomics, medical literature, ontologies, and knowledgebases.

Dr. Takis Benos, Ph.D., joined us on June 15, 2022, from the Department of Computational and Systems Biology at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interest includes Causal modeling; integrative analysis of big, biomedical data; gene expression regulation; modeling of DNA regulatory elements; modeling of microRNA binding events; modeling and simulations of gene networks; gene networks in disease.

Dr. Yiyang Liu, Ph.D., was previously a postdoctoral scholar at the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Florida. She specializes in HIV and substance use research, clinical decision support, and electronic health record analyses. Her Ph.D. training is in psychiatric epidemiology, and most of her doctoral study involved identifying substance use and use disorder behavior risk factors. Her postdoctoral training focuses on leveraging data science and advanced modeling methodologies to study the intersection of HIV and substance use.