Statistical Methods for Linking Health, Exposure, and Hazards

The Environmental Public Health Tracking Network (EPHTN) proposes to link environmental hazards and exposures to health outcomes. Statistical methods used in case–control and cohort studies to link health outcomes to individual exposure estimates are well developed. However, reliable exposure estimates for many contaminants are not available at the individual level. In these cases, exposure/hazard data are often aggregated over a geographic area, and ecologic models are used to relate health outcome and exposure/hazard. Ecologic models are not without limitations in interpretation. EPHTN data are characteristic of much information currently being collected—they are multivariate, with many predictors and response variables, often aggregated over geographic regions (small and large) and correlated in space and/or time. The methods to model trends in space and time, handle correlation structures in the data, estimate effects, test hypotheses, and predict future outcomes are relatively new and without extensive application in environmental public health. In this article we outline a tiered approach to data analysis for EPHTN and review the use of standard methods for relating exposure/hazards, disease mapping and clustering techniques, Bayesian approaches, Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for estimation of posterior parameters, and geostatistical methods. The advantages and limitations of these methods are discussed

Crossing the communication boundary between your field and everyone else - Presented at the Winter 2018 ESIP Meeting

You know you can write a great journal paper, and your colleagues assure you that your talks at professional meetings don’t (always) feel like “death by Powerpoint.” However, when you try to communicate the value of your contributions to folks outside your field, you find a lot of them don’t quite get it. If you’re interested in increasing the impact of your science by sharing it with a larger audience, here’s a place to start.<br