Principal Investigators

Dr. Justice is a Clinical Epidemiologist who has developed multiple large national cohorts based on data from the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System Electronic Medical Record enhanced with National Death Index and CMS data, patient completed surveys, DNA and tissue repositories, and stored pathology samples. She has two decades of experience in the processes required to clean, validate, and standardize raw EMR data and in its analysis using standard statistical methods, machine learning techniques, and cross cohort validations. The oldest and best known of her projects is the Veterans Aging Cohort Study (VACS). VACS is an ongoing, longitudinal study of >170,000 United States veterans with and without HIV infection continuously funded by National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 1996. She has developed and validated widely used indices including a prognostic index, the VACS Index, and a patient reported symptom index, the HIV Symptom Index. She is the principal investigator of the National Cancer Institute provocative questions grant HIV and Aging Mechanisms for Hepatocellular Cancer, has published over 400 peer reviewed manuscripts, and has presented work at the United Nations, The International AIDS Society, The Royal Medical College in London, the White House, and Congress. She is a member of the National Cancer Institute Ad hoc Subcommittee on HIV and AIDS Malignancy and the HIV and Aging Working Group, NIH Office of AIDS Research. She has recently joined the International Advisory Boards of Lancet HIV and Journal of the International AIDS Society.

Dr. Fiellin has focused his scholarly work on the interface between primary care, general healthcare settings and addiction. He is an Internal Medicine physician Board Certified in Addiction Medicine.  He serves as the inaugural Director of the Yale Program in Addiction Medicine. He conducts research on the transfer of treatments for opioid use disorder and alcohol use disorder from specialized settings to office-based, primary care, Emergency Department and HIV specialty settings. He has served as Principal Investigator on multiple NIH-funded research clinical trials, observational studies and implementation science. He has received awards from the American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence,  the American Society of Addiction Medicine, AMERSA and the  the Hazelden-Betty Ford Foundation. He is on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Addiction Medicine, Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, and Substance Abuse and is Co-Editor of Alcohol, Other Drugs & Health: Current Evidence and the Principles of Addiction Medicine, 4th, 5th and 6th Editions. He has served on the Board of Directors of the College on Problems of Drug Dependence and as Co-Chair of the Substance Abuse Task Force for the Society of General Internal Medicine.

Dr. Brandt completed a general Preventive Medicine residency at Madigan Army Medical Center in 1989 and a post-doctoral fellowship sponsored by the National Library of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine in 1997. She is board certified in Preventive Medicine and Clinical Informatics. Her research is interdisciplinary and focuses on issues related to the design, development and use of informatics tools in the domain of clinical research, as well as health services research.