Team - H4P

Research Faculty

Krista Huybrechts, MS, PhD

Krista F. Huybrechts, M.S., Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an epidemiologist in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She also holds an appointment as adjunct Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health. Her research centers on the utilization, comparative safety and effectiveness of prescription medications in pregnant women and their offspring, and on studying the outcomes of medications for mental health disorders in vulnerable populations. She also has a special interest in research methodology and innovative research applications in relation to both these fields of study. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the International Society of Pharmacoepidemiology and Therapeutic Risk Management, and is a member of FDA’s Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee.

Sonia Hernandez Diaz, MD, DrPH

Sonia Hernandez-Diaz, MD, DrPH is a Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her area of interest is drug safety evaluation from non-randomized data, with a special emphasis on the design, conduct, and analysis of studies in pregnant women and their infants. Hernandez-Diaz is Past-President of the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology and Past-President of the Society for Perinatal and Pediatric Epidemiology Research; and currently serves as a Special Government Employee and voting member for the FDA Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee; as a Member of the NICHD Pediatric and Obstetric Pharmacology Study Section; and as Member of the TERIS Advisory Board.

Brian T. Bateman, MD, MSc

Brian T. Bateman, MD, MSc is the Chief of the Division of Obstetric Anesthesia in the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and as a researcher in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics in the Department of Medicine. He is an Associate Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School. His research interests focus on pharmacoepidemiology in pregnancy and the epidemiology of pregnancy-related complications. He has particular interest in the use of opioids during pregnancy and its consequences, the safety of cardiovascular medications in pregnancy, predictors of severe maternal morbidity and mortality, and medication safety in the perioperative period. He is on the editorial board of Anesthesiology and is an editor of the upcoming edition of Chestnut’s Obstetric Anesthesia: Principles and Practices. He is a voting member of the FDA’s Anesthetic and Analgesic Drug Products Advisory Committee. He has served as a technical consultant to the Joint Commission, expert reviewer for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, on study sections at the NIH and PCORI, and grant review boards for funding agencies from several other countries. He serves on the Board of Directors for the Society for Obstetric Anesthesia and Perinatology

Rishi Desai, MS, PhD

Rishi J. Desai, MS, PhD is an Instructor in Medicine and an Associate Epidemiologist in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on assessment of the use and outcomes of pharmacologic treatments for chronic diseases, especially in patient populations under-represented in traditional clinical research including pregnant women and the elderly. Over the last several years, he has worked extensively to evaluate treatment patterns and outcomes of immunosuppressive medications in pregnant women with rheumatologic diseases as well as opioid use in pregnancy. Additionally, he is also keenly interested in developing novel methodology to help improve causal inference from observational data. He serves on the reviewer board for PCORI.

Elisabetta Patorno, MD, DrPH

Elisabetta Patorno, MD, DrPH, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Epidemiologist in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Her research focuses on the assessment of the safety and effectiveness of therapeutics in routine settings of care of real-world patients, including pregnant women and older adults. Her major clinical areas of interest include the pharmacoepidemiology of diabetes, neurological diseases, and the assessment of therapeutics and procedures in the setting of acute hospital care. She has also particular interest in the advancement of methods to improve causal inference in pharmacoepidemiological studies using large health care utilization databases, with a particular emphasis on study design and propensity score methodology for confounding adjustment in non-interventional studies. She currently serves as Chair-elect of the Comparative Effectiveness Research Special Interest Group of the International Society of Pharmacoepidemiology and Therapeutic Risk Management

Kathryn Gray, MD, PhD

Katie Gray, MD, PhD is a junior faculty member at Brigham & Women's Hospital in the Division of Maternal Fetal Medicine. She completed her MD PhD in the Medical Scientist Training Program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, followed by Ob/Gyn residency at Emory University and a combined fellowship in Maternal Fetal Medicine and Clinical Genetics at Brigham & Women's and Boston Children's Hospitals. Currently, Dr. Gray is supported by the BIRCWH training program and spends 75% of her time performing research focused on the genetics and metabolomics of reproductive traits, including preeclampsia and postpartum hemorrhage. She serves as a consultant to the Pregnancy Team on clinical obstetric and genetic issues. Dr. Gray's clinical time is centered on reproductive genetics and clinical obstetrics, including obstetric ultrasound, consultation, and labor & delivery.

Shirley Wang, PhD, ScM

Shirley Wang is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Associate Epidemiologist in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women's Hospital. She is a pharmacoepidemiologist focused on developing innovative, non-traditional analytic methods to understand the safety and effectiveness of medication use in clinical care as well as facilitating appropriate use of complex methods for analyzing large observational healthcare data. To that end, she has developed enhancements to epidemiologic study designs and analytic methods as well as led efforts to guide appropriate use of complex methods for analyzing large observational healthcare data. Shirley has been involved with the US Food and Drug Administration’s Sentinel Initiative since 2011 and her methods work has been recognized with awards from two international research societies. She recently led a joint task force for the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology (ISPE) and the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) focused on improving the confidence of decision-makers in utilizing real world evidence through increasing transparency and reproducibility of healthcare database studies. She is also a writing group member for a National Academy of Medicine white paper on executing and operationalizing open science.

Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D.

Martin Kulldorff, PhD, is a biostatistician in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. His current research centers on developing new statistical methods for post-market drug and vaccine safety surveillance.
He has developed new sequential statistical methods for near real-time post-market drug and vaccine safety surveillance, where the purpose is to use weekly, monthly or other frequent data feeds to find potential safety problems as soon as possible. He has developed a tree-based scan statistic for post-market drug and vaccine safety surveillance. Keeping the outcome definitions flexible, the method simultaneously evaluates thousands of potential adverse events and groups of related events, adjusting for the multiple testing inherent in such an approach. Another more recent area of methodological work is the development of new statistical methods for evaluating the comparative safety of different childhood vaccine schedules. A fourth major area of methodological research is spatial and spatio-temporal disease surveillance, for which Dr. Kulldorff has developed various scan statistics for disease cluster detection and investigation; and for the early detection of infectious disease outbreaks.