About
I received my Ph.D. in Preventive Medicine (Epidemiology) and Public Health, awarded with Summa Cum Laude, from the University of Granada (UGR, Spain) and the ULB (Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium). Also, I have a BSc in Mathematics and Statistics from the Open University, UK, an MSc in Biostatistics from the University of Newcastle, Australia, an MSc in Epidemiology from the ULB, and an MPH from the UGR. After the completion of my Ph.D. in 2010, I moved to the Center for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Research (University of Cape Town) as a postdoctoral fellow for two years. Afterwards, I moved to the Harvard School of Public Health (Department of Epidemiology), where I specialized in epidemiological methods from 2012 to 2015. I have also been trained as an Epidemic Intelligence Officer (EIS), and I worked as a field epidemiologist for several years in different African countries with Médecins Sans Frontières and GOARN-WHO during the Cholera epidemic in Haiti, 2010.
My research interests lie principally, but not exclusively in the field of epidemiological methods and comparative effectiveness research. At UCT, I used marginal structural models applied to large longitudinal data from Khayelitsha (HIV-Cohort) to assess the effectiveness of an observational, nonrandomized intervention Club of Patients. At Harvard, I used fixed effects methods in the context of the analysis of the components of the variance and within-siblings design (observational cross-over) to evaluate the effect of a small fetoplacental ratio at birth on the risk of delivering a small for gestational age infant.
Currently, I am developing in collaboration with colleagues from the Cancer Survival Group (CSG) at the LSHTM data-adaptive methods for model selection and evaluation based on cross-validation techniques, cvAUROC, and applying advanced causal inference methods such as targeted maximum likelihood estimation TMLE to study cancer outcomes.