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Brisa N. Sánchez, PhD (she/her)

Brisa Sanchez headshot

Dornsife Endowed Professor of Biostatistics and Associate Dean for Research
Epidemiology and Biostatistics
267.359.6128
bns48@drexel.edu
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Degrees

PhD, Biostatistics, Harvard University
ScM, Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health
MS, Statistics, University of Texas at El Paso
BS, Mathematics, University of Texas at El Paso

Bio

Prof. Brisa N. Sánchez serves as Associate Dean for Research at Dornsife SPH and as Dornsife Endowed Professor of Biostatistics. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and a master’s degree in Statistics from the University of Texas at El Paso, and a PhD in Biostatistics from Harvard University. In 2006 she joined the Biostatistics Department of the University of Michigan, where she was later named John G. Searle Assistant Professor and was promoted to Full Professor with tenure in 2018. She joined Drexel University in 2019. Prof. Sánchez is an active proponent of and participant in team science approaches to address public health challenges, to which she contributes not only her statistical knowledge and expertise but also her knowledge of a variety of research areas and enthusiasm for scientific discovery. Through immersion science content, she marries statistical rigor with practical considerations of the research questions at hand.

Prof. Sánchez develops and applies statistical methodology to study social and environmental determinants of health and health disparities. She leads methodological research to develop exposure assessment methods and to assess health impacts of neighborhood-level exposures (social and built environment) and their interactions with individual-level factors. These methods include enabling data-driven estimation of time and spatial scales at which environmental exposures shape health behaviors and downstream biological outcomes, and characterize the simultaneous impact of multiple, correlated environmental features on health, including social factors. This research has been funded through NIH grants, including "Characterizing health impacts of built environment features using complex data" (R01 HL131610, PI: Sanchez). Sánchez is internationally recognized for her work on latent variable models with environmental health applications.

She also has extensive expertise in research involving health disparities and cardiovascular disease, including stroke, as well as the effectiveness of nutrition policies geared toward improvement of children’s health and learning. She co-leads projects to evaluate how the food environment in schools, regulated through food nutrition policies for schools, impacts child health and learning, and how food environment near schools modifies the impact of school nutrition policies on student outcomes. These projects utilize longitudinal records on over 11 million children collected over more than 15 years (R01HL136718; R01HD111169; R01MD017687). In addition, she served co-Principal investigator of the NSF-funded, mixed-methods project, "Neighborhood Environments as Socio-Techno-bio Systems in Mexico City," which focused on how water infrastructure in neighborhoods shapes and is shaped by residents' trust in water and their health.

Her research has been published in leading statistical, epidemiology, and medical journals including JASA, Biometrics and the Journal of Applied Statistics, Statistics in Medicine, Epidemiology, American Journal of Epidemiology, Environmental Health Perspective, JAMA Pediatrics and Health Affairs. She has held multiple leadership roles in research collaborations, research administration, professional organizations, and has served on panels for the National Academies of Science. She served as Director or co-Director of several NIH-funded research centers, and currently also directs the Biostatistics for Social Impact Collaboratory. She previously served as Book Reviews Editor for Biometrics, a leading journal in biostatistics, as well as Associate Editor for Statistics in Medicine and the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series C. She has served in multiple elected positions for the Eastern North American Region of the International Biometrics Society and the Statistics Section of the American Public Health Association.

Research Interests

  • Statistical Methods Development
  • Big Data
  • Data Integration
  • Health and Place or Built Environment
  • Development of Mixed Methods
  • Health Disparities
  • Spatial Analysis or GIS
  • Environmental Exposures
  • Policy Effectiveness

Publications

Recent Publications:

Figueroa-Oropeza JL, Rodríguez-Atristain A, Cole F, Mundo-Rosas V, Muñoz-Espinosa A, Figueroa-Morales JC, Boudart Z, Téllez-Rojo MM, Bautista-Arredondo SA, Sánchez B, Roberts EF. ¿Agua para todos? La intermitencia en el suministro de agua en los hogares en México. Salud Publica Mex. 2023 Jun13;65:s181-s188. doi:10.21149/14783. PMID: 38060967. Spanish.

Gouveia N, Rodriguez-Hernandez JL, Kephart JL, Ortigoza A, Betancourt RM, Sangrador JLT, Rodriguez DA, Diez Roux AV, Sanchez B, Yamada G; SALURBAL Group. Short-term associations between fine particulate air pollution and cardiovascular and respiratory mortality in 337 cities in Latin America. Sci Total Environ. 2024 Apr 10;920:171073. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.171073. Epub 2024 Feb 19. PMID:38382618, Free PMC article.

Sanchez-Vaznaugh EV, Matsuzaki M, Acosta ME, Vasanth S, Dugay ER, Sánchez BN. "Competitive" food and beverage policies and weight status: A systematic review of the evidence among sociodemographic subgroups. Obes Rev. 2024 Apr;25(4):e13678. doi: 10.1111/obr.13678. Epub 2023 Dec 27. Review. PubMed PMID: 38151337; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC10947922.

Li J, Hirsch JA, Michael YL, Besser LM, Auchincloss AH, Hughes TM, Sánchez BN. Spatial scale effects on associations between built environment and cognitive function: Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis. Health Place. 2024 Mar;86:103181. doi: 10.1016/j.healthplace.2024.103181. Epub 2024 Feb 9. PMID: 38340497.

Michael YL, Senerat AM, Buxbaum C, Ezeanyagu U, Hughes TM, Hayden KM, Langmuir J, Besser LM, Sánchez B, Hirsch JA. Systematic Review of Longitudinal Evidence and Methodologies for Research on Neighborhood Characteristics and Brain Health. Public Health Rev. 2024 Mar 26;45:1606677. doi:10.3389/phrs.2024.1606677. eCollection 2024. PMID: 38596450 Free PMC article. Review.

Ruiz OA, Ancira-Moreno M, Omaña-Guzmán I, Cordero SH, Morales ACB, Navarro CP, Méndez SB, Flores EM, Trejo A, Kaufer-Horwitz M, Cajero A, Sánchez B, Bernat C, Salgado-Amador E, Hoyos-Loya E, Mazariegos M, Manrique CM, Cruz RP, Mendoza E, Brero M, Sachse M, Armijo FC. Low quality of maternal and child nutritional care at the primary care in Mexico: an urgent call to action for policymakers and stakeholders. Int J Equity Health. 2024 Feb 22;23(1):35. doi: 10.1186/s12939-024-02129-z. PubMed PMID: 38388936; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC10885649.

Acosta ME, Sanchez-Vaznaugh EV, Matsuzaki M, Barba N, Sánchez BN. Temporal Patterns in Fruit and Vegetable Intake Among Racially and Ethnically Diverse Children and Adolescents in California. Prev Chronic Dis. 2024 Feb 8;21:E09. doi: 10.5888/pcd21.230162. PubMed PMID: 38329921; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC10870998.

Won JY, Elliott MR, Sanchez-Vaznaugh EV, Sánchez BN. Estimating the effect of latent time-varying count exposures using multiple lists. Biometrics. 2024 Jan 29;80(1). doi: 10.1093/biomtc/ujad027. PubMed PMID: 38386360; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC10883070.

Won J, Elliott M, Sanchez-Vaznaugh E, Sanchez B. Integrating multiple built environment data sources. Annals of Applied Statistics. 2023 June; 17(2):1722-1739. NIHMSID: NIHMS1987803

Peterson A, Berrocal V, Sanchez-Vaznaugh E, Sanchez B. How close and how much? Linking health outcomes to built environment spatial distributions. Annals of Applied Statistics. 2023 June; 17(2):1641 - 1662. NIHMSID: NIHMS1987804.

*Rengifo-Reina H, Barrientos-Gutiérrez T, López-Olmedo N, Sánchez BN, Diez Roux AV (2023). “Frailty in Older Adults and Internal and Forced Migration in Urban Neighborhood Contexts in Colombia,” Int J Public Health; 68:1605379.

*Braverman-Bronstein A, Vidaña-Pérez D, Diez Roux AV, Pérez Ferrer C, Sánchez BN, Barrientos-Gutiérrez T (2023). “Association of service facilities and amenities with adolescent birth rates in Mexican cities,” BMC Public Health;23(1):1321.

Buxton MA, Castillo-Castrejon M, Godines-Enriquez M, Valentín-Cortés M, Morales-Hernández V, de Arellano LM, Sánchez BN, Osornio-Vargas A, O'Neill MS, Vadillo-Ortega F (2023). “The pregnancy research on inflammation, nutrition, & city environment: systematic analyses study (PRINCESA) cohort, 2009-2015”. Eur J Epidemiol;38(9):1009-1018.

Abelson JL, Sánchez BN, Mayer SE, Briggs H, Liberzon I, Rajaram N (2023). “Do diurnal salivary cortisol curves carry meaningful information about the regulatory biology of the HPA axis in healthy humans?”, Psychoneuroendocrinology; 150:106031. doi: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2023.106031.

*Matsuzaki M, Sanchez-Vaznaugh EV, Alexovitz K, Acosta ME, Sánchez BN (2023). “Trends in school-neighbourhood inequalities and youth obesity: Repeated cross-sectional analyses of the public schools in the state of California”, Pediatr Obes;18(3):e12991. doi: 10.1111/ijpo.12991.

*Bakhtsiyarava M, Schinasi LH, Sánchez BN, Dronova I, Kephart JL, Ju Y, Gouveia N, Caiaffa WT, O'Neill MS, Yamada G, Arunachalam S, Diez-Roux AV, Rodríguez DA (2023). “Modification of temperature-related human mortality by area-level socioeconomic and demographic characteristics in Latin American cities”, Soc Sci Med; 317:115526. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115526.

Hirsch JA, Michael YL, Moore KA, Melly S, Hughes TM, Hayden K, Luchsinger JA, Jimenez MP, James P, Besser LM, Sánchez B, Diez Roux AV (2022). “Longitudinal neighbourhood determinants with cognitive health and dementia disparities: protocol of the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis Neighborhoods and Aging prospective cohort study”, BMJ Open; 12(11):e066971. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2022-066971.

*Avila-Palencia I, Sánchez BN, Rodríguez DA, Perez-Ferrer C, Miranda JJ, Gouveia N, Bilal U, Useche AF, Wilches-Mogollon MA, Moore K, Sarmiento OL, Diez Roux AV (2022). “Health and Environmental Co-Benefits of City Urban Form in Latin America: An Ecological Study”, Sustainability; 14 (22):14715. doi: 10.3390/su142214715.

*Li J, Peterson A, Auchincloss AH, Hirsch JA, Rodriguez DA, Melly SJ, Moore KA, Diez-Roux AV, Sánchez BN (2022). “Comparing effects of Euclidean buffers and network buffers on associations between built environment and transport walking: the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis”, Int J Health Geogr. 17;21(1):12. doi: 10.1186/s12942-022-00310-7.

*Bakhtsiyarava M, Ortigoza A, Sánchez BN, Braverman-Bronstein A, Kephart JL, Rodríguez López S, Rodríguez J, Diez Roux AV (2022). “Ambient temperature and term birthweight in Latin American cities”, Environ International; 167:107412. doi: 10.1016/j.envint.2022.107412.

See Dr. Sánchez's complete list of publications on PubMed