The Department of Population Medicine is pleased to introduce this year’s Thomas O. Pyle Fellowship awardees. Each fellow will study under the mentorship of a Department of Population Medicine faculty member who aligns with their area of expertise, with the overall goal of contributing to the development of health care policy at any of several levels - public, organizational, or clinical.

Takuya Kawahara, PhD | Mentor: Jessica Young, PhD Dr. Kawahara’s research interests include statistical methods in clinical studies, causal inference from complex time-varying treatments, truncation by death, missing data, principal stratification, patient-reported outcomes, meta-analysis, composite endpoint approach, regulatory science, and medical device development. Dr. Kawahara will work under the supervision of Drs. Jessica Young and Mats Stensrud (Assistant Professor of Statistics, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland) on applications to cancer trials of novel methods for causal inference when clinical outcomes of interest (such as quality of life) are subject to truncation by death.  Dr. Kawahara earned his PhD from the University of Tokyo.

Sarah McKetta, MD, PhD | Mentor: Brittany Charlton, MSc, ScD Dr. McKetta is a researcher focusing on reproductive and perinatal disparities for LGBT+ Americans, with special attention towards structural causes. She has a clinical background in sexual health. Her work under the mentorship of Dr. Brittany Charlton will focus on measuring reproductive health disparities across multiple axes of minority statuses (e.g., gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, nativity). Dr. McKetta earned her MD and PhD from Columbia University.

Natalie Smith, PhD | Mentor: Davene Wright, PhD Dr. Smith’s long-term goal is to have an independent research career focused on preventing cancer in the U.S. by increasing the implementation of evidence-informed public health policies. She is a decision scientist with interests around integrating medical decision making methods such as economic evaluation, simulation modeling, and stated preference elicitation into implementation science and research dissemination. Dr. Smith earned her PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Tingting Yu, PhD | Mentor: Rui Wang, PhD Dr. Yu’s research includes longitudinal data analysis, survival data analysis, joint modeling of correlated data, as well as addressing issues of data complications such as censoring and outliers. With Dr. Wang, she will work on developing statistical methods for variable selection and handling data heterogeneity in integrated or clustered health data. Dr. Yu earned her PhD in Statistics from the University of British Columbia, Canada.

About the Thomas O. Pyle Fellowship

Created by the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Foundation and Harvard University in honor of Thomas Pyle, who was Chief Executive Officer of Harvard Community Health Plan for many years and a leader in the Harvard and Boston communities, the Thomas O. Pyle Fellowship supports scholarly work that contributes to the development of health care policy at any of several levels - public, organizational, or clinical.
 

The application cycle for the 2023 - 2024 year is now closed (1/6/23).
 Learn more about the Pyle Fellowship here.