Marsha Piacun is a registered dietitian and the program director of the dietetic internship at Tulane. Her degrees are from the University of Texas in Austin and Loyola University. She began her career at Charity Hospital where she directed the School of Nursing food service and compiled information to begin the dietetic traineeship program.  She then directed the program for three years.  After staying home with her 3 children for several years, she returned to work part time as a dietitian consultant to several healthcare facilities. Over the years, the numbe

Valerie A. Paz-Soldan is a Peruvian-American social scientist based permanently in Peru as the Director of Tulane’s Health Office for Latin America (~19 years). She obtained her PhD in Maternal and Child Health (2003), with a minor in Population Studies, for which she took courses on demography, health econometrics, health policy, and qualitative research, and used mixed methods for her dissertation work on reproductive health in Malawi.

Dr.

Jeffrey Shaffer, PhD, is a biostatistician and data capture and management specialist. His current work involves capturing, managing, and analyzing clinical and laboratory data for infectious diseases in West Africa (including Lassa fever, Ebola virus disease, and malaria) where he oversees the data management and biostatistics cores for two large federally-funded research projects. He has extensive international research experience and regularly provides training workshops and sets up data capture and management systems across West Africa. His earlier research focused o

Jian Li is a biostatistician and bioinformatician. His research includes both development of analytical methodology and analyses of high-throughput data.

Dr. Shankar's research is focused on the application of experimental design, multiple regression analysis, time series analysis, categorical data analysis and multivariate analysis in health and social sciences research. She has developed temporal and spatial interpolation methods to merge two or more secondary datasets that do not have common geographical identifiers.

Sudesh Srivastav has a broad background and experience in biostatistics and quantitative bioinformatics with specific training and expertise in statistical design of experiments and its application in clinical trials, re-sampling methods, and analysis of big data. He is actively involved in collaborative research with a number of faculty members from within the department as well as from other departments of the Health Sciences Center at Tulane University, particularly the Tulane Cancer Center and the Louisiana Cancer Research Consortium (LCRC).

Wan Tang's primary research focuses on: statistical methodological development in fields such as longitudinal data analysis, missing data, nonparametric smoothing methods, and causal inferences, and their application in biomedical studies, especially in psychiatry and behavioral research.

Joshua Yukich is an epidemiologist and health economist. His research focuses on preventing and eliminating malaria and other vector borne disease with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. His main area of work involves the use and collection of surveillance data for malaria and the measuring of malaria transmission in intervention suppressed areas. Dr. Yukich was trained in epidemiology, public health, and health economics, and much of his work is centered around the synergy of these topics.

Mark Wiser's primary interest is the molecular and cellular biology of protozoan parasites and their interactions with the hosts. Major research accomplishments include the description of proteins synthesized by the malaria parasite and exported to the host cell; a proposed novel secretory pathway of the malarial parasite which functions to target proteins to the host erythrocyte, as well as a characterization of protein kinases and chaperones of the malarial parasite.