Faculty Mentors

Dr. Juillard is a trauma surgeon and founding co-Director of PASE-UCLA, which aims to improve access for quality surgical care in LMICs. She has over 13 years of experience leading research studies in Cameroon and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), which focus on improving access for quality trauma care, including serving as MPI with Dr. Chichom for NIH-funded projects on mHealth and trauma QI.

Dr. Cryer is a Professor of Surgery and the immediate past Chief of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery at UCLA. He is a past president of the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma and a past member of the Executive Committee of the ACS-COT, where he served as Chair of the Performance Improvement and Patient Safety Committee and the Trauma Quality Improvement Project (TQIP).

Dr. Tillou is a Professor of Surgery and currently serves as Vice Chair for Education for the UCLA Department of Surgery, where she oversees all departmental education-related activities. She is the founding Director of the UCLA Department of Surgery Accredited Education Institute (AEI) and the Assistant Designated Institutional Official of the UCLA School of Medicine. Her research interest focuses on multidisciplinary team training, curriculum design/innovation, and acute care surgery outcomes.

Dr. Russell is an Associate Professor of Surgery at UCLA and is a nationally recognized expert in QI and surgical outcomes. She can provide research mentorship for STREaM trainees in quality improvement, surgical health services research, and surgical care for vulnerable populations. She developed the initial quality indicators for elderly patients undergoing major abdominal surgery in 2005 and updated them for all elderly surgery patients in 2009.

Dr. Gibbons is a Professor of Surgery in the UCLA Department of Surgery with an adjunct appointment at RAND Health and helped found the Center for Surgical Outcomes and Quality at UCLA. Her research interests include assessing and improving quality of surgical care, disparities in care, patient navigation, survivorship, and appropriateness of surgical treatment. She serves as mentor for the National Clinician Scholars Program and is currently funded by the NIH.

Dr. David Elashoff is a Professor of Medicine, Biostatistics and Computational Medicine at UCLA and Director of the Department of Medicine Statistics Core. He serves as Leader for the Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design (BERD) for the UCLA CTSI and the Co-Lead of the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center (JCCC) Biostatistics Program. He has extensive collaborative experience on a variety of basic science, clinical research, and clinical trials research projects.

Dr. Harrigan is an Assistant Adjunct Professor at the Center for Tropical Research and UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. He has extensive experience working in African settings and has co-organized several workshops on the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and spatial modeling. His research focuses on the impact of bioclimatic and socioeconomic factors on the prevalence and distribution of infectious diseases.

Dr. McCoy is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology, and Program Lead and Curriculum Coordinator of the UC Berkeley Epidemiology and Biostatistics Online MPH program (OOMPH). For a decade, Dr. McCoy has provided mentorship to trainees at the undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral, and junior faculty levels, including postdoctoral fellows in SSA through the NIH Fogarty Global Health Equity Scholars Program.

Dr. Hubbard is a Professor of Biostatistics, co-director of the Biomedical Big Data pre-doctoral (T32) training program and of the Center of Targeted Learning, Director of the computational biology Core E of the SuperFund Center at University of California, Berkeley (NIH/EPA), and consulting statistician on multiple federally funded and foundation projects. He has worked on a diverse range of projects, but most of his work has focused on semi-parametric estimation in high-dimensional data.

Dr. Petersen is an Associate Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, Chair of the Division of Biostatistics, and co-Chair of the Graduate Group in Biostatistics at UC Berkeley. Dr. Petersen is an internationally recognized leader in the development of novel data science methods at the intersection of causal inference, machine learning, and statistics, and the application of these methods to improve global health.

Dr. Li, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. He is an expert on high-dimensional complex data analysis and statistical machine learning, with applications in neuroimaging analysis, Alzheimer's disease, computational biology, and biomedical research. He has over 80 publications in statistical methodology, theory and applications in top statistics and biostatistics journals.

Dr. Wang is an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics with expertise in causal inference, streaming data, and high dimensional data analyses. Her research on machine learning led to her inclusion on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2021. She will provide expert mentorship in three areas: 1) causal inference in complex observational data, 2) high dimensional data analysis, and 3) mHealth studies with dynamic statistical inference. Dr. Wang received an NSF award from the Division of Mathematics.

Dr. Corinne Riddell is a social and perinatal epidemiologist, and an Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Divisions of Biostatistics and Epidemiology. She leads a body of research on US racial inequalities in health, with a specific interest in measuring how some states have fared better than others at reducing disparities. Dr. Riddell uses interactive data visualization to explore these topics, as well as sophisticated surveillance and causal methodologies.

Dr. Kang Dufour is an Associate Adjunct Professor in the Division of Biostatistics Berkeley and an Associate Professor at the UCSF Division of Prevention Science. Her research interests are in implementation science for public health programs. She is particularly interested in the application of quantitative methods to the evaluation of population interventions in the effectiveness and scale up phases of implementation. Much of her work is conducted in SSA.

Dr. Chichom is a Professor of General Surgery and the Vice-Dean in charge of Research and Cooperation at the Faculty of Health Sciences at University of Buea. He was the Head of the Department of Surgery in the same faculty for over a decade. He also serves as the Director of Research for Cameroon at PASE-UCLA.

Dr. Nguefack-Tsague currently teaches coursework in Biostatistics, Data Science and Health Informatics. His research addresses topics in data analysis, programmatic mapping and size estimation of populations most at risk of HIV, HIV modelling, and health information systems, health research secondary data analysis, in particular demographic and health survey (DHS) data.

Dr. Tendongfor is an Associate Professor of Medical Microbiology and Head of the Department of Public Health and Hygiene at the University of Buea. He has expertise in community directed interventions, health programs evaluation, and experimental design and data analysis. Hehas served as principal and co-principal investigator in many WHO, European Union and European Foundation Initiative for Neglected Tropical Diseases (EFINT)-sponsored projects implemented in Cameroon and other SSA countries.

Dr. Halle-Ekane is a Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology & Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences and serves as Cameroon’s coordinator for the Geneva Foundation for Medical Education and Research, Switzerland. Dr. Halle-Ekane’s academic experience has given him expertise in research planning and execution of projects related to trauma and non-communicable diseases in Cameroon.

Dr. Nsagha is a Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Public Health and Hygiene and Vice-Dean in Charge of Programmes and Academic Affairs of the Faculty of Health Sciences. Dr. Nsagha has international experience scaling-up interventions, conducting impact evaluations, developing investment projects, and building public health research capacity across SSA.

Dr. Ayuk is an Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Public Health and Hygiene at Buea, and an International Research Fellow at Stellenbosch University and the University of South Africa. He possesses over ten years of research experience in the fields of occupational health and safety, public health, nutrition, health promotion, behavior modification, policy development and analysis, and migration work.

Dr. Mackersie is the immediate past Director of Trauma Services at San Francisco General Hospital, a post he held for over 20 years, and a Professor of Surgery at UCSF. He is an internationally recognized authority on trauma care and trauma systems and has authored or co-authored over 140 publications.

Dr. Knudson is a Professor of Surgery at UCSF, Adjunct Professor at the Uniformed Services University, and the Medical Director of the Military Health Service Strategic Partnership with the ACS. She is currently the deputy editor of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons and also serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery.

Dr. Shete is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at UCSF. Her work focuses on designing context-specific implementation strategies for evidence-based public health interventions. She is principal investigator of studies in Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and the US. She uses methods in implementation science, modelling, social epidemiology, and health economics to develop more patient-centered approaches to care.

As a clinician investigator, Dr. Garcia focuses on comorbid mental health and chronic diseases and their disproportionate impact on vulnerable and marginalized populations. Dr. Garcia has researched the unique challenges that patients with co-morbid mental health and chronic diseases face and focused on implementation work in mental health integration and improvement of service delivery for populations with language barriers.

Dr. Machekano is the Director of Biostatistics and Research Data Management at the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatrics AIDS Foundation and an Associate Professor at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He provides statistical leadership of operational research studies and oversight of biostatistics teaching at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Stellenbosch University.