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Applied Infectious Disease Forecasting For Public Health, Graham Gibson

Doctoral Dissertations

Infectious disease modeling has emerged as a powerful data driven tool for monitoring outbreaks, assessing intervention strategies, and allocating public health resources. This thesis addresses a variety of challenges faced in real-world infectious disease forecasting. We first present methods for aggregating forecasts made at different spatial scales, where explicitly modeling the spatial dependency would be computationally prohibitive. We then extend the mechanistic model framework to create an operational forecasting model capable of handling real-world COVID-19 surveillance system issues. Finally, we propose a new framework for merging mechanistic and statistical approaches to infectious disease forecasting. This framework allows modelers to construct …

Accelerometer-Determined Physical Behavior Metrics And Their Associations With Sarcopenia Among Oldest-Old Adults, Eric M. Eberl

Masters Theses

INTRODUCTION: Sarcopenia is a loss of muscle function and muscle mass which frequently occurs among the oldest-old adult population (aged 85+ years). The analysis of accelerometer-determined physical behavior volumes and patterns of oldest-old adults might provide novel insights into the associations with sarcopenia and its components. METHODS: A total of 145 participants in the primary sample and 87 participants in the subsample with a mean age of 88.2 (2.5) years from the Health, Aging, and Body Composition study cohort provided cross-sectional data of handgrip strength, appendicular lean mass, gait speed, and accelerometry. Probable, confirmed, and severe sarcopenia were assessed based …

High-Dimensional Feature Selection And Multi-Level Causal Mediation Analysis With Applications To Human Aging And Cluster-Based Intervention Studies, Hachem Saddiki

Doctoral Dissertations

Many questions in public health and medicine are fundamentally causal in that our objective is to learn the effect of some exposure, randomized or not, on an outcome of interest. As a result, causal inference frameworks and methodologies have gained interest as a promising tool to reliably answer scientific questions. However, the tasks of identifying and efficiently estimating causal effects from observed data still pose significant challenges under complex data generating scenarios. We focus on (1) high-dimensional settings where the number of variables is orders of magnitude higher than the number of observations; and (2) multi-level settings, where study participants …

Investigating The Developmental Impacts Of 3,3’-Dichlorobiphenyl (Pcb-11) In Zebrafish (Danio Rerio), Monika A. Roy

Doctoral Dissertations

The environmental pollutant 3,3’-dichlorobiphenyl (PCB-11) is a lower-chlorinated polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) congener present in air and water samples. Both PCB-11 and its metabolite, 4-PCB-11-Sulfate, are detected in humans, including in pregnant women. The work conducted for this dissertation takes a developmental toxicology approach and uses zebrafish (Danio rerio) to investigate PCB-11’s potential impacts to the liver and pancreas. Chapter 1 introduces PCBs and the current knowledge gaps. Chapter 2 investigates PCB-11 interactions in short-term 4-day exposures with the Aryl hydrocarbon receptor (Ahr) pathway in both 0-20 mM individual and mixture exposures with other Ahr agonists. In Chapter 3, …

Sleep, Reproduction, And Pregnancy, Joshua R. Freeman

Doctoral Dissertations

Sleep, and particularly sleep timing, prior to conception may be important for reproductive and pregnancy health. Evidence of a biological mechanism relating sleep to reproductive health from laboratory studies suggests that sleep may influence the hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian (HPO) axis. The role of sleep in the HPO axis may also impact many reproductive outcomes including reproductive hormones, ovulation, pregnancy, live birth, pregnancy loss, and adverse pregnancy outcomes. However, epidemiological evidence for associations between sleep, especially sleep timing, and these reproductive health endpoints is limited with most studies typically assessing shift work, and not sleep patterns directly. To address these gaps, we evaluated …

Mental Health And Adiposity: The Effects Of Racial Discrimination And Social Relationships, Nicole D. Fields

Doctoral Dissertations

Excess adiposity is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and premature mortality. It is well-documented that Black women are disproportionately affected by excess adiposity. Research has focused on lifestyle factors, such as diet and physical activity, to explain the higher prevalence of obesity among Black women compared to white women; however, there is much less research on the association between psychological distress and adiposity, which may be important for understanding racial disparities. To date, no studies have examined the social context by which mental health and physical health are related. Black women in U.S. society live …

Policing And Health: Police Encounters As A Fundamental Cause Of Racial Health Disparities, Richard S. Carbonaro

Doctoral Dissertations

Structural racism has taken many forms throughout American history and to this day continues to drive social, economic, and health inequalities. Mass incarceration is a modern tool of social marginalization with well documented and deep-rooted racial inequalities. Research has continually shown that mass incarceration negatively impacts the health of disadvantaged communities. Even police stops, the most common and mundane form of criminal justice contact has been linked with deleterious health outcomes at the individual and community level. In this dissertation, I identify specific social and biological mechanisms connecting encounters with the police and health outcomes. In the first chapter, I …

Evaluating Public Masking Mandates On Covid-19 Growth Rates In U.S. States, Angus K. Wong

Masters Theses

U.S. state governments have implemented numerous policies to help mitigate the spread of COVID-19. While there is strong biological evidence supporting the wearing of face masks or coverings in public spaces, the impact of public masking policies remains unclear. We aimed to evaluate how early versus delayed implementation of state-level public masking orders impacted subsequent COVID-19 growth rates. We defined “early” implementation as having a state-level mandate in place before September 1, 2020, the approximate start of the school-year. We defined COVID-19 growth rates as the relative increase in confirmed cases 7, 14, 21, 30, 45, 60-days after September 1. …

Examining The Co-Infection Effects Of Helminths And Malaria In An Indonesian Community, Andrea Rodríguez-Sánchez

Masters Theses

Malaria is one of the most prevalent vector-borne infectious diseases with major morbidity and mortality in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. Recent epidemiological studies have shown that co-occurrence of soil-transmitted helminth (STH) infections, or infection caused by parasitic worms, are associated with increased risk of malaria infection. However, studies of the association between STH and malaria, and the effect of antihelminth (deworming) treatments that are more commonly used in areas with high STH infection rates, are sparse. Therefore, we explored the relationship between STH and malaria infection in an Indonesian community (N=1997) with high prevalence of both STH and malaria …

Birthweight And Risk Of Autoimmune And Thyroid Conditions Within The Women’S Health Initiative, Brian C. Monahan

Masters Theses

Autoimmune and thyroid conditions account for a substantial proportion of the morbidity and mortality experienced in the United States, affecting >40 million Americans combined. Co-occurrence of both an autoimmune and thyroid condition is also likely, particularly among women. Epidemiologic studies on both sets of conditions have examined many risk factors, including demographic, lifestyle, genetic, and environmental risk factors. However, one area which has been neglected is the effect of early life exposures on the development of autoimmune and thyroid conditions. To investigate the potential association between an individual’s birth weight (by category;in uteroand early childhood, extending the hypothesis to include …

Tai Chi And Mindfulness Training To Improve Balance In People With Multiple Sclerosis: A Community-Based Intervention Study, Julianna Eve

Doctoral Dissertations

Introduction: Tai Chi and meditation have led to improved quality of life, and reduced fatigue and depressive symptoms in people with multiple sclerosis (MS). Tai Chi interventions have successfully improved balance, however the few studies evaluating meditation impact on motor skill improvement have reported conflicting results. Benefits of meditation on improving alertness and attention have been reported, but it is unknown whether these benefits might extend to physical balance. Objective: determine the impact of an 8-week Tai Chi or Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) intervention on physical balance, psychosocial wellbeing, and sensorimotor function; and whether benefits are retained after …

Subnational Analysis Of Birth Weight In Ghana Using Bayesian Spatial Regression Models, Barbara E. Mottey

Masters Theses

Child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa is reducing but the levels remain high with subnational within-country variations. Birth weight is a key predictor of child survival and monitoring birth weight outcomes, in particular, prevalence of low birth weights, is important for resource allocation to improve child survival outcomes.

Past research in sub-Saharan Africa has found that different individual-level factors are associated with birth weight including BMI of mother, sex of baby, educational level of mother, and wealth index of household. Some environmental factors are found to be associated with birth outcomes. However, past findings regarding the association of birth weight with …

Hospital Assessment And Response To Environmental Pollution As A Population Health Need: Identifying Prevalence And Predictors In Community Benefit Practices, Sarah Valentine

Doctoral Dissertations

Hospitals have a growing role in improving population health. Environmental pollution is an important determinant of health with disproportionate effects on Communities of Color. This warrants hospital action. To advance such action, it is important to take stock of current hospital engagement with environmental pollution and to identify factors associated with such engagement. I investigated the following. To what extent do New York State (NYS) non-profit hospitals assess, identify, and respond to environmental pollutants as part of community benefit practices? Do factors previously reported as associated with hospital engagement of social determinants predict engagement with environmental pollution as a community …

The Role Of Vegetative Cover In Enhancing Resilience To Climate Change And Improving Public Health, Anastasia D. Ivanova

Masters Theses

Changing temperature and precipitation patterns are causing degraded soil, water, and air quality which is negatively affecting the safety and health of people, and the productivity of urban and rural communities. However, research shows that implementing urban forests and cover crops into urban and rural landscapes, respectively, can mitigate these effects by providing ecosystem services. As extreme precipitation and heat events continue to intensify, there is a need for comprehensively assessing these ecosystem services under changing climates and for this information to be easily accessible by communities for rapid land-use decision making. Therefore, I investigated the role of urban forests …