Brown School › Academics › PhD in Public Health Sciences › PhD Faculty

PhD Faculty

Students in the PhD in Public Health Sciences program have the opportunity to work with faculty participating in locally, nationally, and globally recognized research and studies on both the Danforth and Medical School campuses. Their areas of interest range from data analysis to community outreach to AI modeling for positive health outcomes. Learn more about our faculty community and how you can be a part of building a better present and future.

Browse Our PhD Faculty

Filter: Systems and Data Science

Ellis Ballard

Ellis Ballard

Assistant Professor of Practice

  • 314-935-3072
  • eballard@wustl.edu

​Ellis Ballard’s research and teaching focus on advancing participatory approaches to system dynamics modeling with communities to advance health access and social justice. He is director of the Brown School’s Social System Design Lab in which role, he innovates group model building practice methods in cross-cultural contexts, trains future cohorts of social work and public health practitioners to apply system dynamics modeling in their work, and cultivates the growing global community of community based system dynamics practitioners.
Abigail Barker

Abigail Barker

Research Associate Professor

  • 314-935-3513
  • arbarker@wustl.edu

Abigail Barker is the faculty lead for data and methods at the The Center for Advancing Health Services, Policy & Economics Research at the Institute for Public Health. Her role includes helping social science and clinical researchers add cost and cost-effectiveness analyses to their work to increase policy relevance, as well as creating data visualizations to allow stakeholders to interactively understand the tradeoffs of various health policy choices.
Anne Mobley Butler

Anne Mobley Butler

Assistant Professor of Medicine

  • 314-454-8354
  • anne.butler@wustl.edu

Dr. Butler is a pharmacoepidemiologist with broad research interests in non-experimental studies, real-world data, comparative effectiveness research, and epidemiologic methods. Her research involves the application of epidemiologic study designs and analytic methods to highly detailed, clinical and administrative data captured on patients as part of routine clinical care. Her substantive work focuses on the treatment and prevention of common infections, including antibiotic and vaccine utilization, effectiveness, safety, and related outcomes. She also applies and develops epidemiological methods to identify and account for common sources of biases in non-experimental studies that use administrative data. Given that various patient populations are rarely included in clinical trials, real-world evidence generated from these studies are useful to inform decisions related to clinical practice, health policy, and quality improvement interventions.
Yin-Cao

Yin Cao

Associate Professor of Surgery, Associate Professor of Medicine

  • 314-747-3925
  • yin.cao@wustl.edu

Dr.Cao’s research group specializes in systems and translational cancer epidemiology with an overarching goal to develop precision-based cancer prevention/control strategies. Our current projects incorporate novel high-throughput technologies (genomics, microbiome, proteomics, accelerometers) into large-scale collaborative population-based/clinical studies to address provocative questions in gastrointestinal cancer prevention, including but not limited to the etiology of sporadic cancers among younger adults, the biological basis for cancer disparity, and the role of host-microbial interactions in carcinogenesis.
Graham-A.-Colditz

Graham A. Colditz

Niess-Gain Professor in the School of Medicine Chief, Division of Public Health Sciences Associate Director of Prevention and Control, Siteman Cancer Center Deputy Director

  • 314-454-7940
  • coldtizg@wustl.edu

With a longstanding interest in the causes and prevention of chronic disease, particularly among women, Dr. Graham Colditz, chief of the Division of Public Health Sciences at Washington University School of Medicine, has evaluated numerous lifestyle factors including exogenous hormones and breast cancer risk and the development of statistical models to predict cancer risk for individuals. Other areas of expertise include implementation science and evaluation of guidelines being used in routine clinical practice.
Patrick Fowler

Patrick Fowler

Professor

  • 314-935-5859
  • pjfowler@wustl.edu

Patrick J. Fowler's research aims to prevent homelessness and its deleterious effects on child, family, and community well-being. Trained in child clinical-community psychology, Fowler uses innovative methods that rigorously investigate policies and programs intended to promote housing and family stability. Recent research focuses on cross system collaborations to prevent child maltreatment associated with family homelessness, as well as youth homelessness in the transition from foster care to adulthood.