Shook-Sa receives Research Career Development Award
September 27, 2024
Bonnie Shook-Sa, DrPH, has received a Research Career Development (K) Award from The National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The award will total over $800,000 spanning the next five years. Her project is titled “Generalizing Effects of Infectious Disease Prevention Interventions in the Presence of Interference.”
Dr. Bonnie Shook-Sa
An ongoing challenge for measuring the effectiveness of infectious disease prevention strategies is capturing downstream impacts, or spillover effects. The effects of an intervention on an individual who receives it are sometimes only part of the intervention’s overall impact. For example, someone’s vaccination status may have spillover effects, affecting the subsequent infection statuses of individuals in the surrounding community. Additionally, samples used to study infectious disease interventions are not always representative of the populations where interventions will ultimately be applied, leading to concerns with external validity. Simultaneously accounting for both of these challenges in statistical analyses remains largely unexplored.
Shook-Sa will be working at this intersection of infectious diseases, causal inference, and epidemiology. She is an associate professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Gillings School. She is also assistant director of the UNC Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) Biostatistics Core and a member of the UNC Causal Inference Research Lab, with over fifteen years of collaborative research experience across a range of critical public health areas.
Part of the award will support professional development, as well as new statistical analyses and the development of novel methods for infectious disease research.
