CCEB Seminar, Abby Rudolph, PhD

"Integrating Individual, Spatial, and Network Analyses to Inform Substance use and HIV Prevention Strategies"Abby Rudolph, PhDAssistant Professor, Department of EpidemiologyBoston University, School of Public Health   Dr. Abby E. Rudolph is an Infectious Disease Epidemiologist whose research incorporates social network and spatial approaches to better understand the independent and combined influence of individual, network (sociometric and egocentric), and environmental (built and social) factors on disease transmission dynamics, recruitment patterns, risk behaviors, and health service use among marginalized populations. She received her MPH from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in 2007 and her PhD in Epidemiology from Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2011. Her dissertation evaluated respondent-driven sampling (RDS) with respect to its assumptions and the potential for biased measures. Since defending her dissertation, she has implemented and evaluated RDS studies conducted in a variety of different study populations and settings, including people who use drugs (PWUD), people who inject drugs (PWID), and men who have sex with men (MSM). She has also consulted on the analyses of several other projects that used RDS and other network-based recruitment strategies in Baltimore, California, New York City, Appalachia, Mexico, Lithuania, Malawi, Vietnam, and Thailand.