Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics Seminar Series

Wednesday, May 17, 2023

2:30 PM-3:30 PM

David M. Kline, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Biostatistics and Data Science, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, will present "An integrated abundance model for estimating county-level prevalence of opioid misuse in Ohio."

Dr. David Kline is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Data Science in the Division of Public Health Sciences at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. He has a secondary appointment in the Department of Epidemiology and Prevention and is Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Statistical Sciences. His research is focused on developing biostatistical methodology to overcome challenges in public health surveillance and address key problems in population health and epidemiology. Specifically, I work on developing multivariate Bayesian hierarchical models for spatio-temporal disease mapping that leverage multiple sources of data to address complex, difficult to measure social and epidemiological problems. Dr. Kline earned his PhD in biostatistics from The Ohio State University.

Opioid misuse is a national epidemic and a significant drug-related threat to the United States. While the scale of the problem is undeniable, estimates of the local prevalence of opioid misuse are lacking, despite their importance to policy-making and resource allocation. This is due, in part, to the challenge of directly measuring opioid misuse at a local level. To overcome these challenges, we developed a Bayesian hierarchical spatio-temporal abundance model that integrates indirect county-level data on opioid-related outcomes with state-level survey estimates on prevalence of opioid misuse to estimate the latent county-level prevalence and counts of people who misuse opioids.

Contact Information

Nancy Colon-Anderson
nanderson@drexel.edu