Social Epidemiology

Through my work with the Big Data for Health Equity team, I have gained considerable experience with large-scale data management and analytics using public health data from the CDC and NIH, as well as new media data sources. I’ve integrated diverse data sources and used multilevel modeling approaches to examine intersectional health inequities. I’m also involved in research that is developing used novel machine learning approaches to derive public sentiment measures from social media data to use as social-contextual measures to investigate health disparities.

#BigData4HealthEquity

Race Disparities in Maternal Health and Birth Outcomes

• Nguyen, T. T., Criss, S., Kim, M., De La Cruz, M. M., Thai, N., Merchant, J. S., … & Nguyen, Q. C. (2022). Racism during pregnancy and birthing: experiences from Asian and Pacific Islander, Black, Latina, and Middle Eastern women. Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, 1-11.

• Examining Twitter-Derived Negative Racial Sentiment as Indicators of Cultural Racism: Observational Associations With Preterm Birth and Low Birth Weight Among a Multiracial Sample of Mothers, 2011-2021

  • We uncovered increased incidence of pre-term birth and low-birth weight among racially minoritized mothers living in areas with higher racial animosity across ten years of National Vital Statistics System Natality (NVSS-N) data: