For students looking for an opportunity to conduct research in data science and statistics, please check out the postings from faculty!
Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy
Jiantao Ma
Jiantao Ma, PhD, Assistant Professor
Contact Email: jiantao.ma@tufts.edu
Research Interests
- Applies the molecular epidemiology approach to study mechanisms of diet-disease associations. Also has a focus on traditional epidemiological approaches
- Currently involved in a study on the CHARGE consortium with the following primary goals
- To test the effects of the DASH diet in many gene-lifestyle cohorts
- To identify novel genetic loci for blood pressure that may not have been detected previously when interaction was not considered
- To characterize gene-diet interactions in known and novel blood pressure loci
- Interested in applying similar methodologies to the UK Biobank
Fang Fang Zhang
Fang Fang Zhang, PhD, Associate Professor
Contact Email: fang_fang.zhang@tufts.edu
Research Interests
- Research interests:
- Dietary intake patterns of US adults and children
- Patterns of ultraprocessed food (UPF) consumption in US children
- Does UPF consumption contribute to obesity risk in children in GUTS cohort
- Role of nutrition in cancer prevention and controls
- Does UPF consumption increase risk of various cancer in Nurses’ Health Study (NHS) and HPFUS cohorts
- Dietary interventions among cancer patients and survivors
- What are the effects of altering UPF consumption on various cancer mortality and child obesity in the U.S.
- Nutrition policies for reducing cancer burdens and disparities
- Patterns of snack consumption in the United States. What is the nutritional profile of snacks commonly consumed in the United states
- Dietary intake patterns of US adults and children
- For students looking to get involved: skills and timeline
- Look at getting involved in the spring, work through the summer, and potentially submit conference abstracts
- Students can expect to assist in Clinical research (data collection and enrollment), conduct remote nutrition counseling, and assist in statistical analysis
Sean Cash
Sean B. Cash, PhD, Associate Professor
Contact Email: sean.cash@tufts.edu
Research Interests
- Research Interests
- Economic behaviors of consumers and households
- Nutrition, Economics and interactions with the food environment
- Consumer Experiments (Online choice experiments and consumption patterns)
- Farmer and resource industry surveys
- Economic aspects of behavior in nutrition and health interventions and evaluations
- Current Projects
- Dollar stores and food access
- Dollar store use in the pandemic
- Analysis of scanner data
- Coffee and climate change
- Costa Rican production systems
- US consumer survey
- Disparities in state-level nutrition policy
- How different consumers respond differently to the same intervention
- Produce Prescription program evaluation
- Dollar stores and food access
Will Masters
Contact Email: william.masters@tufts.edu
Research Interests
- Presentation on the process of conducting data-intensive economic research
- Past research subjects
- Project in India on caregivers’ response to incentives
- Project in West Africa on citizen policy preferences
- Project in East Africa on farmers’ demand for crop storage
- Project in US on weight-loss users’ response to social incentives
Tufts School of Medicine
Laura Corlin
Laura Corlin, PhD, Assistant Professor of Public Health and Community Medicine
Contact Email: laura.corlin@tufts.edu
Research Interests
- Research Interests
- Air pollution and meteorological factors and their affect on COVID-19 transmission and severity
- Inequalities in exposure to air pollution and other community-level environmental factors and how they affect COVID-19 outcomes and experience
- How do air pollutant mixtures affect cardiometabolic disease progression through causal pathways mediated by inflammation and modified by sex
- How do air pollutants affect individuals’ proteome, metabolome, and DNA methylation profile
- How to make exposure assessment for multiple air pollutants more efficient and accurate
- How do perceptions of safety affect the use of public transportation
- How does academic training affect the use of state-of-the art epidemiological methods
- How do metal mixtures mechanistically affect diabetes incidence. How are these pathways modified by social factors
- Skill requirements (in one of the following)
- Structural equation models
- Causal mediation models
- Latent growth curve models
- Self-organizing maps
- Experience analyzing proteomics, metabolomics, and/or DNA methylation data.
Mei Chung
Mei Chung, PhD, Associate Professor of Public Health and Community Medicine
Contact Email: mei_chun.chung@tufts.edu
Research Interests
- Systematic reviews and meta-analysis research
- Research Topics:
- Vitamin D and Calcium Status on children 12-36 months old
- Risk of opioid addiction after undergoing total knee or total hip arthroplasty in opioid-naïve patients.