Ariella Hoffman-Peterson
School of Public Health
Health Services Organization and Policy
PhD Student

Ariella is a second-year PhD student in the Health Services Organization and Policy program. Her interests are in the ethical and equitable distribution of emerging health technologies. Her focus is on sociology and organizational studies, which will allow her to expand her range of quantitative and qualitative research methods needed to evaluate and improve precision medicine policy, while critically engaging with organizational behavior, social determinants of health, and public health genetics frameworks. The certificate program will further her career goals of continuing on from her PhD program to precision medicine policy roles, such as a science policy fellowship or working in medical device regulation, or regulatory or government affairs within precision medicine companies.

Shreya Kapoor
School of Information
Health Informatics
MS Student

Shreya is a second-year master’s student in the Health Informatics program. She received her undergraduate degree in dentistry in India, where she also worked in social work and gained valuable knowledge around social determinants of health. Her interests are in healthcare IT, She currently works at the Sight Outcomes Research Collaborative Ophthalmology Data Repository at Kellogg Eye Center, where she collects, deidentifies, reviews, and cleans health data from a number of medical academic institutions. She is also part of the Knowledge Grid team in the Department of Learning Health Sciences. The precision health certificate will help her build upon her educational background in health IT and help her achieve her career goals of building health informatics architecture that provides knowledge for the health of individuals and populations.

Claire Liu
School of Public Health
Health Behavior and Health Education
MPH Student

Claire is in her second year of the MPH program in Health Behavior and Health Education. Switching from biomolecular science to science and technology studies as an undergraduate allowed her to study both the fundamental sciences of medicine and their application to social, cultural, political, and economic issues. She completed her capstone project on the effect of electronic health records (EHR) on the physician-patient relationship. This summer she interned with the Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation to determine the status of learning health systems (LHS) activities across different departments. LHS can provide a new way of synthesizing EHR data to facilitate and improve clinical decision making. She believes it is critical for health care practitioners to emphasize building trust with patients and the community and to investigate the lived experiences of patients outside a clinical setting. She aspires to become a public health emergency medicine physician.

Krista Meserve
Department of Chemistry
Analytical Chemistry
PhD Candidate

Krista is in the fourth year of her Analytical Chemistry PhD program. Her interests are in bioanalytical assay research with applications in improving public health and medicine. In her current research, she uses a microring resonator sensing platform to develop assays for immunoprofiling of varying disease states. These projects include a precision medicine approach to developing diagnostics for latent tuberculosis, longitudinal profiling of preterm neonate immune biomarkers, and a prognostic tool for Ebola virus. Her research experiences are focused on bioanalytical assay development, optimization, and application. Participating in the Precision Health Graduate Certificate Program will be an asset to her educational goal of gaining a stronger background in statistical analysis to improve the interpretation of large amounts of data and will help her career goals by providing foundational knowledge in the public health sector.

Chloe Romero
College of Pharmacy
PharmD Program
PharmD Candidate

Chloe is a third-year student in the PharmD program. Her research interests include how genetics can impact the absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) of pharmaceuticals, and she also has an interest in writing clinical protocols. She is seeking which area of clinical research she wants to focus on, and feels that the precision health certificate will ensure she is well versed in several different areas. For example, informatics classes can further her understanding of how pharmacogenetics plays a role in clinical studies. Being involved with clinical trials is more than understanding if and how the drug works, but understanding the many influences that impact its survival on the market.

Callie Swanepoel
Department of Human Genetics
Genetics and Genomics
PhD Candidate

Callie is a fifth-year PhD student in Genetics and Genomics. During her masters of biomedical science program, she helped develop a tool to control gene expression, which was used to understand the mechanism of a placenta-specific growth hormone in promoting fetal growth. She also worked in a lab to identify prognostic biomarkers for oropharyngeal cancer to devise individualized patient treatment plans. She uses both experimental and computational approaches to understand the genetic mechanisms of non-mendelian inheritance, or genes that are transmitted at higher-than-expected frequencies, to reveal foundational mechanisms of genome evolution that have important implications for genomic regions susceptible to disease mutations. Callie hopes to combine the skills from her academic research, laboratory clinical care, consulting, and education outreach to pursue a career in precision health. She is particularly interested in educating health care professionals on the application of genetic diagnostic tools in patient care.