News

August 2, 2022

Richard Garland Featured on Public Health America

On this episode of Public Health America, Richard Garland discusses the national surge in gun violence and how it is a public health problem that requires public health intervention.

July 28, 2022

A summer academy for high schoolers aims to bring more students to public health

PITTWIRE- To create Pitt’s Public Health Science Academy, take 10 teenagers from three Pittsburgh high schools, add 10 faculty mentors, mix with inspiration for four weeks and finish with possibly life-changing results.That’s the recipe that Dean Maureen Lichtveld crafted to attract more underrepresented students to the field, as well as to college itself.

July 27, 2022

New Public Health Leaders Named

Two School of Public Health departments will welcome new leaders in time for the fall 2022 semester. Mary Hawk, DrPH, has been appointed chair of the Department of Behavioral and Community Health Sciences (BCHS) and Yan Ma, PhD, will lead the Department of Biostatistics. Both positions are effective September 1.

July 24, 2022

Peter Salk says newest U.S. case of polio sounds a warning

PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE - After a man in Rockland County, New York, became the first patient to contract polio in the U.S. in nearly a decade, experts such as IDM’s Peter Salk — whose late father, Jonas, developed a vaccine for the disease — said the public shouldn’t be alarmed but warned that children unvaccinated for polio could be at risk. “Polio is only a plane flight away,” Salk said. “Here is a circumstance that demonstrated that.”

July 19, 2022

Jian Zou awarded the Mihaela Serban Memorial Award for best poster

Congratulations to Jian Zou (BIOST '23) who was awarded the Mihaela Serban Award for best poster in the American Statistical Association (ASA) Pittsburgh Chapter's 2022 poster contest for his presentation "CGMM: an algorithm for constrained model-based clustering". Jian’s work is advised by Dr. George C. Tseng

July 19, 2022

Ellen Tan receives Student Research Award

Xiaoqing (Ellen) Tan (BIOST '22) received the Student Research Award at the 35th New England Statistics Symposium for her work "A Tree-based Model Averaging Approach for Personalized Treatment Effect Estimation from Heterogeneous Data Sources". This is the work that has recently been accepted to the Thirty-ninth International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML ’22), the leading international academic conference in machine learning.

July 12, 2022

New Covid Subvariants Highly Contagious, immune evasive, experts say

Dean Maureen Lichtveld said a true “rebound” case means being infected with the same variant. “We know, for example, that with the coronavirus there are a number of variants,” Lichtveld said

July 5, 2022

Karen Krymski (BCHS '82) wins Network State Star Award

Karen Krymski recently received the Florida SBDC Network’s State Star Award at the Network’s Small Business Success Summit, held in Tampa on June 28. The award recognizes Krymski for her accomplishments in 2021. Only one State Star is awarded by the Network each year. Krymski, who earned her MPH from Pitt Public Health in 1982, has been a member of the Florida SBDC at the University of South Florida team since 2015. She is a procurement sp...

June 21, 2022

This Pitt researcher is using data to fight the opioid epidemic

PITTWIRE - Jeanine Buchanich, a research associate professor in Biostatistics, is taking a big-picture approach to figuring out what programs will best tackle the problem.Buchanich has evaluated public health interventions as varied as community-level training for first responders on naloxone use and stigma reduction; county and municipal health department prevention efforts; the Patient Advocacy Program, which helps patients who have been presc..

June 8, 2022

Study finds health care workers reluctant to post about COVID -19 vaccine on social media

NEXT PITTSBURGH - BCHS' Beth Hoffman and Jaime Sidani led a study, recently published in the Journal of Community Health, which highlights COVID-19 hesitancy, acceptance and promotion among health care workers. Partnering with scientists in the Department of Psychiatry they used Twitter analysis and health care worker surveys to gain insight regarding that hesitancy. Additional authors include BCHS' Kar-Hai Chu, Elizabeth Felter and MPH student,

May 19, 2022

Landsittel named as Fellow of the American Statistical Association

Douglas Landsittel (BIOS '97) is among a select group named to the distinction of American Statistical Association (ASA) Fellow. Landsittel is currently a professor and chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Indiana University School of Public Health - Bloomington. ASA Fellows are selected from hundreds of annual nominations. The association selects Fellows who—among other criteria—have participated in ASA initiatives,...