Past Events

Dr. Kamen's research has focused on factors that lead to health disparities among sexual and gender minority populations, specifically disparities in cancer-related health outcomes and psychological distress

Dr. Scarlett Lin Gomez is an epidemiologist with research interests in the role of social determinants of health, including race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, immigration status, sociocultural factors, and neighborhood contextual characteristics, on health outcomes.

Diet and Cancer: Harnessing Emerging Technologies to Advance Etiologic Research and Improve Nutritional Assessment

Three approaches to estimation from nonprobability samples are quasi-randomization, superpopulation modeling, and doubly-robust estimation. In the first, the sample is treated as if it was obtained via a probability mechanism but, unlike in probability sampling, that mechanism is unknown. Pseudo selection probabilities of being in the sample are estimated by using the sample in combination with some external data set that covers the desired population.

In cancer screening trials and population-based comparisons, mortality reductions are usually summarized by an overall (single-number) mortality reduction. This proportional hazards model is logically untenable. I describe a model Liu et al. (IntStatRev2015) for the expected reductions in each (Age,Year) cell of a Lexis diagram.

An important problem in many fields is the modeling and prediction of events that are rare but have significant consequences. Unexpectedly heavy rainfall, large portfolio loss, and dangerously low birth weight are some examples of rare events.

Moving etiologic findings to clinical applications

The tragedy of the commons, first proposed by William Lloyd in 1833, is an economic problem in which every individual has an incentive to consume a resource at the expense of every other individual with no way to exclude anyone from consuming. It results in overconsumption, under investment, and ultimately depletion of the resource.

We extended the computational methods for analysis of mutation signatures in order to describe patterns of chromosomal rearrangements. In particular, the rearrangement signatures enable the assessment of proficiency of homologous recombination (HR). HRDetect, an algorithm we developed, predicts probability of HR-deficiency, and is based on holistic portrayal of mutational signatures across different classes of somatic mutations.