Research Abstract
I am committed to pursuing an academic research career to study and improve health policy making. I have both academic and industrial experience working on computer modeling of various fields including macromolecules, protein binding, traffic routing, signal processing, and disease simulation modeling. My current research interests are on using modeling to investigate the benefits and harms of lung cancer screening and the applications of advanced engineering simulation methods on cancer screening simulations.
Simulation modeling and clinical trials offer different and complementary ways to investigate the relationship between a health care intervention and outcomes. The advantage of simulation modeling is the ability to integrate currently available short-term data to project long-term consequences. In the field of engineering, many techniques have been cultivated to improve the speed and the quality of simulation models. However, health service researchers utilize few of these techniques. My goal is to evaluate the applicability of some these techniques in cancer screening simulation.
I have developed many simulation models in c++ during my time at the MGH Institute for Technology Assessment. I have cultivated a vast computational skill-set for disease modeling. My research builds upon my past experiences, focusing on transferring advanced computer techniques to calibrate cancer screening simulation, model validation, and model comparison. I am the MGH Site Principal Investigator for the Lung Group of the National Cancer Institute's Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network (CISNET) and participate in comparative modeling projects evaluating lung cancer screening programs and (U.S.) population trends in smoking patterns and lung cancer mortality.
My research consists of three components: (1) the incorporation and evaluation of some engineering optimization methods for the calibration of cancer screening simulation; (2) the development of a validation procedure of the cancer induction component of a cancer screening simulation;(3) establishing a general computational method to refine the simulation model or compare the performances of different simulation models for the same underlying disease.
In summary, my research translates the existing modeling methods to improve health policy simulation models. My methodological research interests focus mainly on the development and calibration of complex microsimulation models.
