Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics Dissertation Defense: Kelsey Alexovitz

Thursday, August 22, 2024

2:00 PM-3:00 PM

Kelsey Alexovitz, MA, MBA, will defend "Statistical Approaches for Examining Exposure to Multiple Environment Features."

It can be difficult to estimate effects of the built environment due to its multi-faceted interrelated features that may operate at different spatial scales. In this dissertation we develop three approaches to characterize one aspect of the built environment, the food environment (FE), and examine it's effect on measures of health: (1) a latent transition analysis (LTA) model that uses zero-inflated Poisson distributions to classify the FE and assess its evolution over time, (2) a bias-adjusted 3-step BCH-GEE approach to estimate the effect of latent FE classes on multi-level longitudinal outcomes, and (3) LASSO methods to address questions such as spatial scale and feature grouping that arise when estimating the effects of the FE. We apply these methods to characterize the unhealthy FE surrounding California public schools, as well as estimate the association between child obesity and their schools' food environment.

Kelsey is a PhD candidate in Biostatistics working under the supervision of Dr. Brisa Sánchez. Her research at Drexel focused on statistical methods for the built environment.

Zoom link

Contact Information

Nancy Colon-Anderson
nanderson@drexel.edu