June 30, 2014

The Drexel School of Public Health is pleased to announce the appointment of five new Assistant Professors who will be joining the faculty this summer and fall.

Four will begin this fall, one in each department, as part of the Urban Health Cluster search: Ghassan Hamra (EOH), Félice Lê-Scherban (Epi/Biostat), Jonathan Purtle (HMP), and Alexis Roth (CHP).

The school also welcomes Genevieve Pham-Kanter as Assistant Professor of Health Management and Policy, joining us in July.

As is apparent from their bios below, all five bring outstanding expertise, will add depth and breadth to work already being done at our School, and will further expand our scholarship and teaching.  Full faculty pages will be available soon.

Dr. Ghassan Hamra is an occupational and environmental epidemiologist with a strong interest in exposure assessment and Bayesian statistics. He received his MSPH and his PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Most recently, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the International Agency for Research on Cancer. His work focuses on quantifying risk of chronic diseases and the development and application of methods to overcome analytic challenges in occupational and environmental health research. In addition to his research, Ghassan is committed to providing high quality methodological training to emerging scientists, and has published several methodological papers aimed at demystifying complex topics in epidemiology.

Félice Lê-Scherban is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, where she is affiliated with the Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health. She holds a PhD in epidemiology from the University of Michigan and MPH in epidemiology and biostatistics from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research centers on health disparities with a focus on the impact of education on healh, chronic disease disparities, life course determinants, and immigrant health.

Dr. Jonathan Purtle's research focuses on mixed methods approaches to understanding the sociopolitical contexts in which policy is made, evaluating trauma-informed approaches to health care delivery in urban areas, and developing effective science-based advocacy strategies. Jonathan served as the Research Director for Healing Hurt People-a trauma-informed, hospital-based violence intervention programin the  Department of Emergency Medicine at the Drexel College of Medicine . Jonathan is co-creator and regular contributor to The Public's Health-a public health blog and column with The Philadelphia Inquirer. His research has been published in the journals such as the American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Traumatic Stress, Injury Prevention, Journal of Trauma & Acute Care Surgery, and presented at numerous scientific conferences. Jonathan holds a DrPH in Health Policy & Management from Drexel and an MSc in sociology from the University of Amsterdam.

Dr. Alexis Roth received a PhD in Health Behavior from Indiana University in 2012 and then completed a NIDA-funded postdoctoral fellow (T32 DA 023356) in the Division of Global Public Health at the University of California San Diego. Her research focuses on understanding individual, dyadic, and structural factors that influence STI/HIV risk behavior and drug use. Her recent projects use mobile technologies to monitor behavior with the goal of informing personalized interventions that respond to risk in real time.  Dr. Roth also collaborates on projects that seek to expand access to HIV/STI testing and treatment, improve HIV medication adherence, and research ethics. 

Genevieve Pham-Kanter is an economist whose research focuses on policy questions related to physician-industry relationships and conflicts of interest in medicine. Other research interests include pharmaceutical and medical device policy, physician behavior and physician labor markets, and empirical ethics and empirical health law. Methodologically, she specializes in statistical methods used for causal inference. Prior to joining Drexel, she was an assistant professor jointly in the Colorado School of Public Health on the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, and in the Department of Economics at the University of Colorado Denver; she also held research fellow appointments at Harvard University and at Princeton University. She received a PhD in Economics and in Sociology from the University of Chicago.