Dr. Moon Choi, Assistant Professor at the Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology and former post-doctoral fellow at VCU, visited the Division of Epidemiology on July 7th and presented a seminar entitled “When the longevity revolution meets the data revolution.”

Congratulations to doctoral student Natalie Bareis for successfully passing her PhD comprehensive exams!

Congratulations to Prachi Desai, MPH on her graduation from the VCU Master’s in Public Health program! Prachi presented her capstone titled “Evaluation of the Greater Richmond Area YMCA Diabetes Control Program” at the MPH Capstone and Poster Presentation Forum on May 1 and graduated the following week on May 8. She has accepted a position as the Waterborne Disease Surveillance and Outreach Assistant in the Division of Environmental Epidemiology at the Virginia Department of Health.

Dr. Briana Mezuk and Dr. Jeannie Concha held a two-day workshop on “How to obtain data to inform policy and practice” for the VCU Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship Program. Doctoral student Natalie Bareis also participated as a research assistant. The workshop addressed survey methodology, qualitative data collection, community mapping, and creating factsheets to communicate to policy makers. More information about the VCU Humphrey Fellow Program is available here.

Dr. Briana Mezuk will be presenting as part of a panel at the Institute of Medicine conference, “Training in Interdisciplinary Population Health Science: A Vision for the Future,” June 1-2, 2015. She will be speaking on how her training experiences (undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate) prepared her to successfully engage in transdisciplinary population health research. The meeting is free and open to the public. Register here. 

GREMAP member, Lauren Gray, co-authored an opinion article in the Richmond Times Dispatch. The article, which posted on Saturday, July 19, focuses on the work of Gray and other VCU students at CrossOver Healthcare Ministry, a Richmond-based health clinic that delivers medical care to low-income and ininsured individuals. The students worked with VCU faculty and CrossOver health care providers to offer one-on-one bilingual diabetes education, psychological support, and case-management for Latinos with diabetes. Click here for the full article. 

Congratulations to Monique Brown, MPH, PhD on her December 2014 graduation from the VCU PhD in Epidemiology Program! Dr. Brown has accepted a position as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the University of South Florida. 

Doctoral student Natalie Bareis will present her research “Psychiatric polypharmacy and implications for obesity” at the International Society for Bipolar Disorders 2015 Annual Conference. The conference will take place June 3-6 in Toronto, Canada. Dr. Briana Mezuk is a co-author on the abstract. Additional conference details can be found here.