MGH INSTITUTE FOR TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Data Analyst II
- Research Staff
Alec received a Bachelor of Arts in biology from Cornell University in 2018 and a Master of Public Health in epidemiology and biostatistics from Johns Hopkins in 2021. Before joining the ITA, Alec worked as a research assistant on various projects, covering topics including HIV, implementation science, and COVID-19. Additionally, he has experience working in the healthcare technology industry at a value-based care software company. He joined the ITA in 2021 and is currently working with Dr. Jag Chhatwal on projects related to hepatitis C elimination
Job Titles:
- Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard Medical School
Ali Hajjar joined the MGH Institute for Technology Assessment (ITA) in August 2020 as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow within the Radiology Department. He received his Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, M.S. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh, and B.S. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM), Saudi Arabia.
Dr. Hajjar's research lies in the area of medical decision making and operational efficiency in healthcare delivery systems. His primary methodological and computational research interest is stochastic optimization, in particular completely and partially observable Markov decision processes (MDPs). During his graduate studies, his research focused on personalizing the screening decisions for patients with multiple chronic conditions (MCC).
At ITA, he is working with Dr. Jagpreet Chhatwal on research projects related to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and screening for Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC).
Job Titles:
- Associate Director
- Senior Scientist
- Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School
- Associate Director / Senior Scientist / Assistant Professor of Radiology, Harvard Medical School
Dr. Knudsen, a Senior Scientist at the MGH Institute for Technology Assessment and an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, has expertise in decision science. Her research focus is on development and application of data analytics and simulation models to address important questions pertaining to cancer prevention and opioid misuse reduction. Recognized nationally for her leadership in decision science and colorectal cancer screening, Dr. Knudsen's research has significantly influenced national colorectal cancer screening policies. This includes contributions to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' National Coverage Determinations for colorectal cancer screening tests and the screening recommendations of both the US Preventive Services Task Force and the American Cancer Society.
Notably, Dr. Knudsen developed one of the three colorectal cancer models funded by the National Cancer Institute's Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network (CISNET), a consortium of independent research teams focused on evaluating cancer-control policies.
Dr. Knudsen received a BS with Distinction in policy analysis from Cornell University and a PhD in Health Policy from Harvard University. While at Harvard, Amy was the recipient of a Cancer Prevention Training Grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from Harvard University. She completed a NCI-funded post-doctoral fellowship in the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center Program in Cancer Outcomes Research Training (PCORT). She has worked for health-economics consulting firms where she developed decision-analytic models to assess the lifetime health and economic consequences of obesity and the benefits of weight loss.
Dr. Knudsen's career goal is to improve cancer outcomes by identifying the most effective and cost-effective options for prevention, screening, and treatment. Her research focuses on the use of disease simulation models to inform cancer control policies. Her work to date has focused on colorectal cancer, the second most common cause of cancer death in the US. She developed and programmed a computer model, SimCRC, that simulates the natural history of colorectal cancer among the US population over time and incorporates the effects of prevention, screening, and treatment interventions. SimCRC has been used to inform both state- and national screening coverage decisions and guidelines. Dr. Knudsen's research aims to evaluate how existing and emerging screening methodologies can best be used to minimize the burden of colorectal cancer.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Operations Management at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management
- Assistant Professor of Operations Management, Frankfurt School of Finance & Management
Andres is an Assistant Professor of Operations Management at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. He received his PhD in operations management from INSEAD, France, and his BS in applied mathematics and physics from the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Andres's research uses stochastic simulation and optimization to support decision-making in healthcare settings. Andres joined the MGH Institute for Technology Assessment (ITA) in August 2021 as a postdoctoral fellow. His work here was with Dr. Carrie Cunningham on the optimization of thyroid nodule treatment. In the past, he has also worked on clinical trial design, ICU patient-flow, and resource allocation of mobile healthcare units.
Job Titles:
- Programmer
- Programmer Analyst III
Andrew Eckel is a programmer at the MGH Institute for Technology Assessment, where he writes and maintains population models for multiple cancer sites, as well as database scripts for cost-of-care studies. He received his Master's Degree in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Boston in 2014. Outside of the ITA, he makes music and writes image processing software for visual art.
Job Titles:
- AAAS Science and Technology Fellow
Anneke Claypool is currently an AAAS Science and Technology Fellow in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Prior to this role, Anneke was an AAAS Science and Technology Fellows at the US Agency for International Development in the Malaria Division. She joined the MGH Institute for Technology Assessment (ITA) as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in April 2021. She earned her PhD and MS in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University and her BA in Mathematics and International Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Dr. Claypool's research uses mathematical models to inform health policy decisions. Her research includes cost-effectiveness analysis, modeling mosquito-transmitted diseases, and projecting county-level COVID-19 outcomes in California as part of the SC-COSMO Modeling Consortium. She is particularly interested in developing methods to improve modeling multiple diseases.
At the ITA, she is working with Dr. Mohammad Jalali on research relating to the optimization of HIV testing and treatment in settings with limited resources.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical and Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas at San Antonio
Dr. Vivas-Valencia joined the Department of Biomedical and Chemical Engineering at The University of Texas at San Antonio as an assistant professor in 2023.
Carolina Vivas-Valencia received her MS and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Purdue University. Her research focuses on building innovative data-driven solutions to improve community-based health problems. Carolina's work has leveraged reimbursement claims data to develop epidemiology models to predict health risks for vulnerable populations and study the impact of social determinants on care access and outcomes. Carolina has been a Lee B. Lusted finalist, and in 2020, she was appointed as a LatinX Trailblazer in Engineering Fellow by Purdue's College of Engineering. She received the John W Anderson Foundation Scholarship for her research contributions in healthcare engineering. Currently, Carolina's work includes modeling strategies for opioid misuse prevention interventions and cost-effectiveness analysis of point-of-care devices allocation for HIV detection.
Dr. Vivas-Valencia works with Dr. Mohammad Jalali of the ITA, and Dr. Andrea Ciaranello of the MGH Infectious Disease Division.
Job Titles:
- Associate Director
- Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School
- Association of Endocrine Surgeons Research Committee Chair and Executive Council Member
Dr. Cunningham (nee Lubitz) is an Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, Section head of the Massachusetts General Hospital Endocrine Surgery Unit, and the Associate Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute for Technology Assessment.
She received her undergraduate and medical degrees at the University of Michigan. She completed general surgery training at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Weill-Cornell Medical College. During residency, she studied the genetic basis of thyroid cancer as a part of the NCI-Surgical Oncology Research Training Program. She then completed her clinical endocrine surgery fellowship in 2010 at the Massachusetts General Hospital and obtained a Master of Public Health through the Harvard School of Public Health and was a fellow in the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center Program in Cancer Outcomes Research Training. In 2015, Dr. Cunningham was one of the recipients of the Claflin Distinguished Scholars Award at MGH.
Dr. Cunningham is the Association of Endocrine Surgeons research committee chair and executive council member and the President of the Association of Academic Surgery. Her overarching research mission has been to improve the health and well-being of patients with benign and malignant endocrine-related diseases. She is the principal investigator of an NIH/NCI R-37 (R01-type merit award) award to examine the potential impact of new diagnostic technologies and personalized management strategies in patients with thyroid cancer using mathematical disease simulation modeling and an American Cancer Society Research Scholar Award to develop a patient-reported instrument to assess thyroid-cancer specific quality of life.
Cathy is currently a Ph.D. student at MIT Sloan School of Management studying system dynamics. Her interests largely lie at the intersections between organizational management practices, healthcare choice and provision, and labor.
Prior to joining Sloan, Cathy received a Bachelor of Arts in Neuroscience from Wellesley College. In May 2019, she joined the ITA and worked as a research associate under Dr. Mohammad S. Jalali and Dr. Carrie C. Cunningham on simulation modeling and health outcomes research. Her projects included the development of an opioid systems model and efforts to model and improve the quality of care of patients with thyroid cancer.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology, Columbia University Medical Center
Clare graduated from Binghamton University with a Bachelor of Science in Integrative Neuroscience in 2023. Before Joining the ITA, she worked as a research assistant on various projects studying neuroscience topics such as prenatal alcohol exposure, prenatal methadone exposure, and behavioral drug effects. She joined the ITA in August of 2023, and is currently working on cancer disease and treatment modeling under Dr. Mary Linton Peters.
Claudia graduated from Providence College in 2018 with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics. She joined the ITA in July of 2018 and currently works as a research associate under Dr. Pari V. Pandharipande and Dr. Amy B. Knudsen on colorectal, ovarian, and pancreatic cancer disease modeling.
Job Titles:
- Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard Medical School
Daniel joined the MGH Institute for Technology Assessment (ITA) in August 2023 as a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Mohammad Jalali. Also, he is part of the Rising Scholars Postdoctoral Program at the University of Virginia. Daniel received his Ph.D. in Industrial and Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan and holds a M.S. in Industrial Engineering from Universidad de Los Andes.
His research interests are generally in operations research and, more specifically, in stochastic models and stochastic dynamic programming applied to healthcare. His past research is in data-driven models for improving decision-making in cardiovascular disease, working alongside clinical collaborators at the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs. His work seeks to develop new frameworks for health equity by considering patients' health disparities in disease prevention policies.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Radiology at the University of Washington
- Professor, Radiology, University of Washington School of Medicine
- Professor, Radiology, University of Washington School of Medicine / Section Chief, Breast Imaging / Director of Breast Imaging, Seattle Cancer Care Alliance
Dr. Janie Lee is a professor of radiology at the University of Washington and clinical director of breast imaging at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. Dr. Lee completed her diagnostic radiology residency at the University of Pennsylvania, her clinical fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital, and earned her master's in health policy and management at the Harvard School of Public Health. She is a certified diplomate of the American Board of Radiology and a Fellow of the Society of Breast Imaging. Dr. Lee aims to advance women's health through a combination of clinical, research, and educational efforts. In the breast imaging clinic, she applies state-of-the-art technologies to diagnose breast cancer. Dr. Lee's research focuses on integrating information about patient risk factors, cancer biology, and new imaging tests to improve how we diagnose new breast cancers or recurrences in survivors.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Population Health Sciences, the University of Utah
Elissa holds a bachelor's in biological sciences, a master's degree in engineering economic systems, and a doctorate in management science and engineering specializing in decision analysis and risk analysis from Stanford University. Prior to joining the Institute, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center. Dr. Ozanne also has experience working with leading biotechnology companies in the California Bay Area including Entelos, Inc. and Pharsight, Inc. She completed a fellowship with the ITA's Program for Cancer Outcomes Research Training (PCORT) in 2005. Dr. Ozannne was a Senior Scientist at the ITA and Assistant Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School before becoming an Associate Professor UCSF Medical Center in 2011. She was an Associate Professor, The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice from 2013-2016. She joined the faculty of the University of Utah School of Medicine in 2016. Her primary career goal is to guide effective, patient-centered use of prevention, screening, and treatment strategies in cancer and other contexts. Her research is focused on decision-making, including the developing and testing of clinical decision aids, risk communication methods, cost-effectiveness and risk modeling.
Job Titles:
- Associate Clinical Director, Liver Transplant
Dr. Bethea received a BS from the University of Wisconsin and an MD from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. She completed Internal Medicine residency training at Brigham and Women's Hospital and continued on for an additional invited year as a chief medical resident. She completed Internal Medicine residency training at Brigham and Women's Hospital where she stayed on for an additional invited year as a chief medical resident. She completed Gastroenterology and Hepatology fellowship followed by an Advanced Transplant Hepatology fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital. She remains active in numerous societies and organizations, including the MGH Institute for Technology Assessment where she continues to apply simulation modeling and decision analytic methods to answer clinical questions and improve resource optimization in the areas of viral hepatitis, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and organ transplantation. She remains dedicated to the clinical care of patients with liver disease.
Job Titles:
- Research Scientist
- Research Scientist / Instructor, Harvard Medical School
Erin Stringfellow joined the ITA in October 2019. She holds a PhD in Social Work from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis and a Master of Social Work from the University of Michigan, where she also earned her BA. She specializes in using qualitative and system dynamics methods to develop sustainable interventions and policies that support recovery from addiction.
Prior to joining the ITA, Dr. Stringfellow was a research scientist and assistant research professor at the Missouri Institute of Mental Health at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, where she worked with a dedicated, passionate team to conduct evaluation and research of federally-funded opioid-related grants. She has held multiple affiliations with the Social System Design Lab since 2013, where she developed skills and expertise in community-based system dynamics projects addressing homelessness, behavioral health policy, and opioid overdoses.
Dr. Stringfellow is excited to return to the Boston area. Previously, she worked as a research associate at the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program from 2008-2012.
She is working with Dr. Mohammad Jalali ("MJ") to develop system dynamics models to improve policies focused on substance use prevention, harm reduction, treatment for disorder, and recovery.
Job Titles:
- in 2020 As a Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Gian-Gabriel Garcia joined the MGH Institute for Technology Assessment in 2020 as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. He received his PhD and MS in Industrial and Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan and his BS in Industrial Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh. In his research, Gian is interested in developing data-driven frameworks for predictive and prescriptive analytics as motivated by high-impact problems in healthcare. His current research focuses on (1) using large clinical datasets to gain patient-specific insights on disease progression and (2) combining these insights with stakeholders' perspectives to improve diagnosis and treatment decisions. Gian is also interested in the healthcare policy implications of these models. In 2022, Gian joined the faculty at Gthe H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) at Georgia Tech.
His research spans a wide range of disease areas, including post-traumatic stress disorder, opioid use disorder, concussion, glaucoma, and cardiovascular disease. It has also received recognition through various awards, including the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the INFORMS Bonder Scholarship for Applied Operations Research in Health Services, the SMDM Lee B. Lusted Prize in Quantitative Methods and Theoretical Developments, first prize at the INFORMS Minority Issues Forum Poster Competition, and selection as a finalist for the INFORMS Minority Issues Forum Paper Competition.
Gian is currently working with Dr. Mohammad Jalali ("MJ") on various projects related to screening for post-traumatic stress disorder, social network analysis for opioid use disorder, and analysis of the effects of COVID-19 on opioid-related overdose deaths.
Gian is also passionate about supporting under-represented and minoritized students in engineering through mentorship and outreach. He has led a wide range of mentorship and outreach initiatives at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Michigan. Currently, he serves on the Pitt EXCEL Alumni Board at the University of Pittsburgh.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Data Analytics, Brandeis International Business School
Job Titles:
- Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard Medical School
Hannah received her Bachelor of Science in Mathematics with a specialization in statistical modeling and computing from the University of Texas at Austin in 2023. Hannah joined the ITA in September 2023 and is currently working with Dr. Mohammad Jalali ("MJ"). Before joining the ITA, she participated in a research lab to develop computational tools using machine learning techniques. Her research interests primarily lie in biostatistics.
Job Titles:
- Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard Medical School
Hesam received his PhD in Management Systems Engineering from the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech. He also holds an M.Sc. in Management Science and a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering, both from Sharif University of Technology. During his PhD, Hesam focused on the dynamics of learning from experience in biomedical clinical research, specifically as part of the moonshot to cure cancer. Hesam joined the MGH Institute for Technology Assessment (ITA) in September 2023 as a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Mohammad Jalali ("MJ"). Currently, his research centers around developing simulation models to investigate the behavioral dynamics of the opioid crises and cancer screening.
Job Titles:
- Senior Scientist
- Senior Scientist / Associate Professor of Radiology, Harvard Medical School
Shannon Swan received his bachelor's degree from Creighton University, obtained his medical training at the University of Nebraska, and did his residency in radiology at Indiana University Hospitals. Subsequently, he completed a fellowship in musculoskeletal imaging at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dr. Swan accepted a staff position at the University of Wisconsin after his clinical fellowship. During his early career, he performed many investigations related to magnetic resonance angiography development, and eventually became interested in health services research due to the health policy implications of less invasive technologies. Dr. Swan is a past winner of the General Electric-Association of University Radiologists Research Academic Fellowship (GERRAF) in technology assessment and outcomes research. He received his research fellowship training under Dennis Fryback while at Wisconsin, with an emphasis on modeling preference-based quality of life.
Job Titles:
- Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard Medical School
Jovan Julien (preferred pronoun: li they) joined the MGH Institute for Technology Assessment in 2017 as an affiliated student concurrent to the commencement of their research studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Julien is currently a postdoctoral research fellow working with Jag Chhatwal. They are a Haitian-American earning their PhD in Operations Research at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology in the summer of 2022. GA Tech is also where they received a MS in Health Systems Engineering. They received their ScB in Biomedical Engineering from Brown University. Dr. Julien is also an alumni of the Health Policy Research Scholars leadership program, which supported their PhD studies through funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Before joining the ITA, Dr. Julien worked as an Organizing Programs Director at Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide and facilitator and storytelling and alignment coordinator at Youth for Environmental Sanity. They built relationships with other organizers and communities across the world working to develop democratic decision making practices.
Jovan's research aims to elucidate how individuals and communities can take strategic choices in ways that simultaneously expand wellness for all and the future decision space available to the collective. As a decision scientist focused on policy, they work to create solutions that center democratic decision making through consensus, abolition, and child-centered outcome analysis. Currently, their research focusses on (1) applying mathematical modeling and decision science to alcohol-related diseases to elucidate strategic decisions available to individuals to control their risk of disease. (2) Their research aims also include finding hidden opportunities for policies that leverage consensual decision making processes and education to support disease reduction. While the health policy implications of these models are important at the societal level, Jovan is most interested in leveraging the findings for marooned solutions, solutions that are generalizable across time and space as methods for marginalized and oppressed communities to build power and self-sufficiency, that can be leveraged for liberatory change.
Jovan's research integrates, synthesizes, and facilitates learning about evidence-based models that are accessible, relevant, and available to community actors to transfer power away from state actors towards local communities. They believe designing tools that support democratic decision and policymaking, at its most basic level, is about supporting the actualization of democratic practice that is truly accountable to and in direct control of those who have been traditionally sidelined in US American society.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor, Department of Radiology, University of Washington
- Physician at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance
Dr. Lowry is a physician at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance and an assistant professor in the University of Washington (UW) Department of Radiology. Her clinical practice at the SCCA includes all aspects of breast imaging, including digital mammography, digital breast tomosynthesis ("3D mammography"), breast ultrasound, breast MRI, and image-guided procedures of the breast. Dr. Lowry earned her bachelor's degree from Duke University in Durham, NC, and her M.D. from Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA. She completed her diagnostic radiology residency training and fellowship in breast imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Dr. Lowry's research interests include the evaluation of cancer screening effectiveness and surveillance imaging outcomes for women after treatment for primary breast cancer.
Job Titles:
- Research Fellow, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Melike Yildirim joined the MGH Institute for Technology Assessment in February 2021 as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. She received her PhD from the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2021 and MS in Healthcare Systems Engineering from the Industrial and Systems Engineering at Lehigh University in 2015. In her research, she is interested in the integration of data analytics and modeling in various application domains, with a particular emphasis on healthcare applications. Specifically, she works on data analytic approaches to medical decision making related to the prevention, early detection, and treatment of diseases.
At the ITA, she is working with Dr. Mohammad Jalali ("MJ") on research topics related to system dynamics models to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of opioid use disorder intervention strategies and optimization of scarce resources to reduce HIV incidence.
Job Titles:
- Senior Scientist
- Principal Investigators
Job Titles:
- Co - Chair, Statistics
- Co - Chair, Statistics / Instructor in Radiology / Statistics, Harvard Medical School
Dr. Mercaldo received a BS in Applied Mathematics and Microbiology from the University of Idaho, an MS in Biostatistics from the University of Washington, and a Ph.D. in Biostatistics from Vanderbilt University. He is a Statistician in the Department of Radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and an Instructor of Radiology and Statistics at Harvard Medical School. His research interests include: the development of flexible and efficient epidemiological study designs for longitudinal binary data, the development of software for the analysis of marginalized regression models, and the analysis of high-dimensional data with applications in neurology and radiology.
Neeti graduated from Brandeis University with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Music in 2021. She has had a longtime interest in health policy, and her senior economics thesis investigated how low-income patients use hospital emergency departments due to a lack of accessibility to primary care. Neeti joined the ITA in June 2021 and is currently working with Dr. Jag Chhatwal on projects related to opioid use disorder and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) screening
Peter Mueller is a Research Scientist at the MGH Institute for Technology Assessment. He joined the ITA as a post-doctoral research fellow in 2017. He received his PhD and MA in Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a BS in Math from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Peter's focus in graduate school was applied math and fluid dynamics, more specifically, biomixing (with a focus on the mixing caused by algae at the microscopic level). He began his schooling as a Chemistry major with the intent of going to medical school but ended up focusing on his talents for math and problem-solving. Peter was eventually called back to medicine through medical research presentations at fluid dynamics conferences. His favorite research areas include optimization and mathematical modeling. Aside from research, Peter also enjoys teaching and especially tutoring.
Peter is currently working with Dr. Pari Pandharipande and Dr. Jagpreet Chhatwal.
Job Titles:
- Chairman of the Department of Public Health and Health Technology Assessment at UMIT, Austria
Prof. Uwe Siebert, MD, MPH, MSc, ScD, Professor of Public Health, Medical Decision Making and Health Technology Assessment (HTA), is the Chair of the Department of Public Health, Health Services Research and HTA at UMIT - University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology in Austria and the Director of the Division for HTA in the ONCOTYROL - Center for Personalized Cancer Medicine in Austria. He is also Adjunct Professor of Health Policy and Management, and Epidemiology, at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Affiliated Researcher of the Program on Cardiovascular Research at the Institute for Technology Assessment and Department of Radiology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston. He is the course director of the Harvard summer course on ‘Decision Analysis in Clinical Research' and he has an adjunct teaching appointment at the School of Public Health and Epidemiology at the University of Munich.
After medical school, he worked for several years as a physician in international public health projects in West-Africa, Brazil, and Germany. He then earned an MPH at the Munich School of Public Health, and completed an MSc in Epidemiology and a ScD in Health Policy and Management with a concentration in decision sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health. Before he started his faculty position at Harvard Medical School, he was the Director of the Bavarian Public Health Research and Coordinating Center at the University of Munich, Germany, and completed Visiting Scholarship at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis.
Prof. Siebert is Past-President of the Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM), a member of the Latin America Consortium Advisory Committee of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR), member of the Oncology Advisory Council of the Federal Ministry of Health in Austria, member of the Advisory Board of the GÖG - National Austrian Public Health Institute, member of the Austrian Cochrane Collaboration Branch, and a member of several national and international Directors Boards (Austrian Society of Epidemiology, German Network of EbM; German Association for Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology). He has served as Vice President of SMDM, and member of the ISPOR Board of Directors, the Society for Medical Decision Making Board of Trustees; the Harvard Flagship Initiative in Comparative Effectiveness Research, the ‘National HTA Strategy' Expert Group of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Health, the Advisory Board of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for HTA in Austria, the International Expert Committee Advising the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) on the Methods for Economic Evaluations of Health Care Interventions, the Directors Board of the German Competence Network Heart Failure, and the Extended Board of Directors of the German Association of Health Economics.
He is the Clinical Guideline Commissioner for the Association of the Scientific Medical Societies in Germany (AWMF), Authorized Expert in the COVID-19 Prognosis Consortium and the Scientific Platform Screening- and Monitoring Programs for COVID-19 of AGES - Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety and GÖG advising the Austrian Federal Ministry of Social Affairs, Health, Care and Consumer Protection, Member of the Task Force for COVID-19 Vaccination Implementation of the State Government Tyrol, Chair of the Horizontal Initiative in Causal Inference of the German Society for Epidemiology (DGEpi), Chair of the Working Group "Effectiveness and Side Effects of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions" of the Competence Network for Public Health for COVID-19, and Chair of the Working Groups ‘Health Economics' and ‘Medical Decision Making' of the German Society for Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology (GMDS). He is Co-Chair of the ISPOR-SMDM Modeling Good Research Practices Task Force, Co-Chair of the ‘Issues in Methodology Section' of the SMDM Policy Initiative, a Leadership Member of the ISPOR Personalized/Precision Medicine Special Interest Group, and member of the SMDM COVID-19 Modeling Special Committee.
He has worked with several HTA Agencies (e.g., DAHTA@DIMDI/Germany, IQWiG/Germany, NICE/UK, ANVISA/Brazil, IATS/Brazil, CADTH/Canada, LBI-HTA/Austria, GÖG/Austria) and he advises public and government agencies, academic institutions and industry regarding the conduction of HTAs and their impact on policy and reimbursement decisions. He has authored more than 400 publications (> 20,000 citations, H index > 50) including HTA reports, textbook chapters, scientific articles, policy briefs and editorials, and is Editor of the European Journal of Epidemiology, Associate Editor of Public Health Reviews as well as editorial board member of several scientific journals.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor, College of Engineering, the Pennsylvania State University
Qiushi Chen joined the faculty of The Pennsylvania State University in January 2018 as an assistant professor in the Harold and Inge Marcus Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering.
Dr Chen completed a post-doctoral research fellow at MGH-ITA, and continues to work with Dr. Jagpreet Chhatwal. He received his PhD in Operations Research from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2016 December, and a BS in Industrial Engineering from Tsinghua University, China, in 2010. Qiushi's research interests focus on the mathematical modeling and optimization in the area of health care, including stochastic and dynamic modeling of health interventions, disease prevention and treatment strategies, and health economic evaluation with disease simulation models. He has been closely collaborating with health practitioners from various health institutes such as Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Massachusetts General Hospital. He has won the first prize in 2016 INFORMS Decision Analysis Society Student Paper Competition, and received the honorable mention of 2016 Public Sector Operations Research Best Paper Competition. He also received the George Fellowship from the George Family Foundation in 2012.
Job Titles:
- Graduate Student Researcher
Reagan Collins is an MD candidate at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center School of Medicine and a graduate of Texas Tech University with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics. Previously, she spent her days as a student athlete on the Texas Tech Women's Tennis Team, but now devotes her time to advocating for health equity and access to care in the West Texas region as Co-Founder of the TTU System Public Health and Health Policy Think Tank. Her research interests include health services research, social determinants of health, and simulation modeling. She joined the ITA in June 2021 and currently works under Dr. Carrie Cunningham on efforts to model and improve the quality of care of patients with endocrine-surgery related disease.
Job Titles:
- Professor, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Northeastern University
Job Titles:
- Administrative Manager
- Administrative Manager for the ITA
Sara Hepburn, MA, is the Administrative Manager for the ITA. Sara received her BA in East Asian Studies from Brown University, and her MA in Sustainable Development from SIT Graduate School (formerly the School for International Training). Before joining the ITA, Sara was a project manager for Think:Kids in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Prior to joining Think:Kids, Sara managed several complex domestic and international projects. Projects included designing and managing a gleaning project for low-income families in northern Vermont; a USAID project at Tufts University Medical and Veterinary Schools that installed technology in several east African countries and the D.R.C. to help health workers study, communicate, and respond to outbreaks of zoonotic diseases; and a research project studying multi-drug resistant Tuberculosis at Harvard Medical School. Sara also worked on an IMLS-funded project that created and assessed the viability of an application for blind and low-vision museum visitors at the Peabody Essex Museum in Boston.
Job Titles:
- Co - Chair, Statistics
- Co - Chair, Statistics / Instructor in Radiology / Statistics, Harvard Medical School
Dr. Mercaldo received a BA in Mathematics from Colorado College and a Ph.D. in Biostatistics from Vanderbilt University. She is a Statistician in the Department of Radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and an Instructor of Radiology and Statistics at Harvard Medical School. Her research interests include improving the accuracy prediction models when dealing with missing data, and improving the robustness and reproducibility of large-scale inferential procedures, especially those commonly encountered in genetic studies.
Job Titles:
- Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard Medical School
- Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School
Nazanin is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School and Mass General Hospital. Nazanin received her PhD in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst. She also holds an MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UMass Amherst. Her research focuses on disease modeling, control, and optimization. During her Ph.D., she closely collaborated with the HIV division at the CDC where she developed a sequential decision-making model to control HIV at a national level using reinforcement learning algorithms.
While at the ITA, Dr. Khatami worked with Dr. Mohammad Jalali (MJ) at ITA to develop machine learning models to address opioid crisis in the US. She also worked with Dr. Krishna Reddy at the MGH Medical Practice Evaluation Center (MPEC) to develop a tuberculosis transmission module for people with HIV.
Job Titles:
- Professor at the Heller School for Social Policy and Mgmt, Brandeis University
Dr. Donelan is a prominent survey and team scientist who has conducted numerous national and international surveys of the experiences of patients and health professionals in health care systems, nationally and locally. At Mass General, she is the convener of MGH Health Policy Rounds, she leads the Survey Research and Implementation Unit for the Division of Clinical Research and is a member of the MGH/MGPO Diversity Committee.
Recognized for her skill in designing surveys to measure the experiences of diverse professional and patient/consumer populations, Dr. Donelan's current and recent national projects include the health workforce changes needed to improve care for frail older adults, assessments of care management programs, evaluation of innovations in payment for dually eligible Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries, understanding insurance coverage for cancer survivors, and a test of a virtual clinic to improve evidence-based care for people with Down Syndrome. She is interested in evaluating new forms of human and technology support for diverse populations trying to access and navigate health systems.
Dr. Donelan has led primary research efforts at Mass. General Hospital to measure diversity culture from patient and workforce perspectives, assuring more robust inclusion of patients with disability, limited English proficiency and racial, ethnic and gender minorities. She has been a mentor to several clinician researchers on early stage career projects. She was a member of a National Academy of Medicine Committee to evaluate progress on the 2010 Future of Nursing report.
Dr. Donelan joined the MIHPC faculty in 2003, following more than a decade at the Harvard School of Public Health as founding Managing Director of the Harvard Opinion Research Program, and 3 years as Co-Founder and Senior Vice President of a venture-financed company providing assistance to patients and families confronting complex and critical illnesses. She has received considerable external support for her survey research, including the Patient Centered Outcome Research Institute, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the American Cancer Society, the Commonwealth Fund, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and others. She has published extensively in major medical, nursing, and health policy journals, and is a peer reviewer for multiple journals. She is a member of Academy Health and the American Association of Public Opinion Research.
Job Titles:
- Clinical Pharmacist at CancerCare Manitoba
Dr. Javed is currently a clinical pharmacist at CancerCare Manitoba, dedicated to delivering quality care to cancer patients.
She received her Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of British Columbia (BC) and her masters in Biochemistry from the University of Northern BC, Canada. Sumreen is a trained pharmacist from Pakistan. She specializes in cancer immunotherapy and breast cancer metastasis.
Dr. Javed joined the ITA in September 2022. During her time here, Sumreen worked with Dr. Mohammad Jalali ("MJ") to develop system dynamics models to investigate the barriers to access and disparities in immunotherapy delivery to cancer patients.
During her Ph.D., her dissertation was selected for an oral presentation at the Canadian Cancer Research Conference (2019), one of the most esteemed national gatherings of oncologists in Canada. Sumreen has also received numerous institutional and national awards from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Muslim Awards for Excellence, UBC, and UNBC.
Vladimir Mendoza graduated from Lesley University, Cambridge MA in 2021 with a BA. While there, he was on the cross country and track/field team. He joined the ITA in November 2021. Vladimir's interests include healthcare accessibility, environmental health, and mental health. In his free time, he enjoys spending time with family and hitting the trails with his Siberian husky named Apollo.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor, McGill University
- Decision Scientist
Alton is a decision scientist who develops models that inform clinical practice and health policy. He joined the ITA in February 2021 as a Postdoctoral Fellow. As a member of the Jalali lab, Alton is primarily focused on developing simulation-based health economic analyses of policies to combat the United States opioid epidemic. In 2022, Alton joined the McGill School of Population and Global Health as an Assistant Professor
Prior to joining the ITA, Alton received undergraduate degrees from North Carolina State University in Industrial Engineering and Interdisciplinary Studies with a Global Health concentration. He then worked as a management consultant for U.S. hospitals for two years before pursuing an MS and a PhD in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University. As a researcher, Alton uses simulation, optimization, and methods from data science, epidemiology, and health economics to inform decisions in healthcare. He is interested in augmenting existing methods in healthcare decision modeling and informing decisions in multiple clinical and policy-related areas, including the safety of the donated blood supply, pediatric kidney disease management, and gastrointestinal procedures, and measures to combat the opioid epidemic.
Job Titles:
- Research Scientist, MGH Mongan Institute
Dr Chen is a Research Scientist at the MGH Mongan Institute. From 2018-2021, she was a Post Doctoral Research Fellow at the MGH Institute for Technology Assessment. Dr. Chen received her PhD in Interdisciplinary Statistics and Operations Research from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an MS in Operations Research from Columbia University, New York. She obtained her BS in Electrical Engineering from the Southeastern University in Nanjing, China. With an innate interest in math, Dr. Chen was wheeled back to the major of Operations Research after I stumbled across a class in Stochastic Modeling at Columbia University. Her graduate research was centered around applying statistical analysis, Queueing Theory, and simulation techniques to streamline patient flows in emergency departments. She always enjoyed working in the healthcare management industry, where she cooperates with professionals with various technical backgrounds and combine group wisdoms into advancing innovative healthcare operations and cost-effective healthcare policies. While at the ITA, she worked with Dr. Jagpreet Chhatwal on the development of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) progression model, and research in wearable technologies in screening for A-fib.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Engineering, Dartmouth College
Jade is a PhD student at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, majoring in Operations Research with a minor in Healthcare Management Science. She received her BE(Hons) in Engineering Science from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Since the beginning of her doctoral program in 2019, Jade has been jointly advised by Dr. Turgay Ayer at Georgia Tech and Dr. Jagpreet Chhatwal at the ITA. Methodology-wise, Jade specializes in simulation modeling of diseases and cost-effectiveness analysis for medical interventions. Her work with the ITA spans COVID-19 and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).
Job Titles:
- Graduate Student Researcher