I am an Associate Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Statistical Sciences at Wake Forest University. I am also a Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Biostatistics and Data Science in the Wake Forest University School of Medicine. I completed my PhD in Statistics in 2015 from The Ohio State University.

My research interests are in applied spatio-temporal statistics and Bayesian modeling. I enjoy tackling important questions related to public health surveillance, epidemiology, ecology, and environmental science. My passion is developing Bayesian hierarchical models to jointly model all available data, while simultaneously accounting for complex dependence structures. I especially love thinking about how to make these computationally expense problems tractable. 

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Data Science in the Division of Public Health Sciences at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. I have a secondary faculty appointment in the Department of Epidemiology and Prevention and an Affiliate Faculty appointment in the Department of Statistical Sciences.  I am also a Full Member of the Center for Addiction Research and the Maya Angelou Center for Health Equity.   

Public health surveillance involves the analysis and interpretation of health-related data essential to planning, implementation and evaluation of public health policy and practice. My research is focused on developing biostatistical methodology to overcome challenges in public health surveillance and address key problems in population health and epidemiology. Specifically, I work on developing multivariate Bayesian hierarchical models for spatio-temporal disease mapping, leveraging multiple sources of data to address complex social and epidemiological problems, like the opioid epidemic.

I am an Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University in the Department of Statistical Sciences. I also hold a secondary appointment in the Department of Biostatistics and Data Science. Before coming to Wake Forest, I completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Department of Biostatistics, working with Dr. Tanya Garcia. I earned my Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in the Department of Biostatistics under the mentorship of Drs. Bryan Shepherd and Ran Tao. 

Data rapidly accumulate in the world around us, and with them, the call to answer exciting questions but also barriers presented by messiness or incompleteness. Compelled by the challenge to best use these data for life-changing science, I develop methods that take full advantage of the available data in a statistically sound manner. My work enables biomedical researchers to address and overcome measurement errors, missingness, and censoring in their data. Thus far, I have been motivated by applications in HIV research, electronic health records, health disparities, and neurodegenerative diseases. Collaboration is an instrumental part of this work, as I work with diverse teams of experts (statisticians, epidemiologists, clinicians) to tackle these difficult problems together.

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Statistical Sciences at Wake Forest University. I received my Ph.D. in Mathematical Sciences in 2023 from Clemson University under the mentorship of Dr. Whitney Huang.

My research interest lies in spatio-temporal modeling of environmental variables. Such variables exhibit a complex space-time structure that can be challenging to estimate. My focus is on developing statistical methods that decompose such complex structures into smaller parts that are easier to estimate while ensuring accurate modeling upon recombination. I am also interested in effectively exploiting circularity to analyze and interpret data exhibiting circular behavior accurately.