Lab Members

Dan Weinberger is a Professor in Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at Yale School of Public Health. His research uses a combination of quantitative analysis, laboratory experiments and field work to understand the epidemiology and biology of respiratory infections. Recent work has focused on developing novel analytical methods for the evaluation of vaccines using time series and spatial data. He collaborates widely with public health agencies and academic organizations around the world on these issues. He earned his PhD in biological sciences from Harvard School of Public Health, with a focus on Infectious Disease Epidemiology, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Division of International Epidemiology and Population Studies in the Fogarty International Center at the NIH. Research: Our research is at the intersection of microbiology and epidemiology. We focus on understanding the biological and epidemiological drivers of respiratory infections, including pneumococcus, RSV, and influenza. Major research areas include understanding the biological drivers of the emergence of rare pneumococcal serotypes following vaccine introduction, developing novel statistical approaches to evaluate vaccine impact and effectiveness from observational data, and evaluating the importance of interactions among respiratory pathogens. We employ a variety of tools including experimental and quantitative approaches. Our work is funded by grants from the NIH/NIAID, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Emerging Infections Program (a collaboration between the CDC, the Connecticut Department of Public Health, and Yale), and our work has been supported by a number of industry partners. You can learn more about our research here. Tool Development: I am the co-leader of PopHIVE.org, an innovative data platform that brings together diverse population health datasets from traditional surveillance sources, as well as healthcare data from Epic, Google Trends data, and more. With Stephanie Perniciaro, I developed and maintains a database of clinical trial data on pneumococcal vaccines (https://wisspar.com/). And with Jim Knight and Anna York, we developed Serocall, a software tool for quantifying the distribution of pneumococcal serotypes using whole genome sequence data. Teaching: I teach the Public Health Surveillance course at YSPH. This class uses a mix of lectures, cases studies, and hands on data analysis exercises. Students learn to perform common surveillance analyses including aberration detection (e.g., CUSUM), time series analysis, and spatial cluster detection (SATSCAN). Students learn to do these analyses in R.

Alyssa Sbarra is a MPH candidate in the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases. Her research focuses on using mathematical modeling of pneumococcal disease time series data to evaluate the impact of pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (PCVs) by using innovative statistical methods to provide more credible estimates on a global scale. She received BS in mathematics from Villanova University in 2016.