Speakers

Prof Faina   Linkov
Associate Professor ,University of Pittspurgh

Biography:

Faina Linkov is an Associate Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Dr. Linkov holds PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Pittsburgh. Her current research activities concentrate on several areas including the use of biological tumor markers to detect malignancies at early stages, link between obesity and cancer, health system infrastructure optimization, and medical decision support. Dr. Linkov has active collaborations with the Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh, where she helps with the development of Text Information Extraction System (TIES), a large repository of pathology reports. Dr. Linkov published over 100 peer reviewed papers and chapters on various aspects of gynecologic disease epidemiology, education, and public health. Dr. Linkov served as a peer reviewer for the British Medical Journal (BMJ), Journal of Medical Internet Research, and others. She is one of the core developers of the Global Health Network Supercourse Project (www.pitt.edu/~super1), Supercourse of Science, and Research Methods Library of Alexandria Project, hosted in the Library of Alexandria. Dr. Linkov is a founding editor in chief of the Central Asian Journal of Global Health (cajgh.pitt.edu), a PubMed referenced journal aiming to boost scientific productivity in the developing world.

"Global research productivity in the era of big data: Linking Statistics and Epidemiology"

In the world of ever-growing biomedical data, medicine and science in general can be improved with multidisciplinary science including biostatistics, information science, medicine, and epidemiology. The concept of translational epidemiology has been defined as a fundamental science for moving laboratory discoveries into public health practice. Translational epidemiology has particular applications for primary prevention of various diseases, which has been the focus of Dr. Linkov’s and Dr. LaPorte’s work for many years. One of the biggest challenges in the world of biostatistics today is analysis and interpretation of big data, which has now gone beyond a conceptual construct to a viable working approach for addressing and making use of huge volumes of data. This presentation will focus on several projects implemented by Dr. Linkov that are at the interface of biostatistics and translational epidemiology. An important aspect of this work is identifying and harnessing existing data such as that from cancer registry, tissue repositories, PubMed, Department of Biomedical Informatics Text Information Extraction System (TIES), UPMC Health plan, and many others, and turning these data into actionable knowledge.  Specifically, this presentation will focus on scientific productivity around the world and discuss how statistics plays a role in unequal productivity between developing and developed world. This work has important implications for scientific publishing and scientific productivity around the world. The goal of this presentation is to overview and discusses multidisciplinary research opportunities in the fields of statistics and epidemiology and identify opportunities for collaboration, as linking these disciplines may have dramatic implications for monitoring poverty and other social /economic parameters.