My work
Substantive: I am an environmental and occupational health researcher. I study exposures that occur as mixtures, ranging from chemicals in the air we breath to our day to day consumer products or social experiences. I hope that my work will ultimately inform interventions to improve the health of populations.
Methodological: I often use Bayesian methods to achieve my research goals. Practically speaking, the machinery of Bayesian methods (Markov chain Monte Carlo) allows a great deal of flexibility in model specification and allows us to examine exposures as mixtures in ways that traditional statistical tools are simply incapable of handling. This comes with a computational cost (some models can take days to run), but one that can be well worth it. Much of the time, you can just go grab a coffee or catch up on the latest, page-turning issue of Epidemiology (conflict of interest warning!) and return to find your models have finished running.
I also try to contribute to a productive dialogue about the use of statistical methods for epidemiologic research.
My life: When not in the office, I'm usually hanging out with my family, remodeling my home, riding a bicycle (mountain, gravel, e-bike, or foldable), or making a pizza or fresh pasta, the latter of which I do very frequently.