Aug. 1, 2024. Please join us in welcoming new primary faculty members, Angela Aherrera, DrPH, MPH and Brielin Brown, PhD to the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics!

Dr. Aherrera joins the department as an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology. She is an environmental epidemiologist, whose research focuses on environmental hazards and understanding their role in the development and prevention of adverse respiratory health outcomes. As a NIEHS-FDA K99/R00 grantee, she is currently investigating the exposure and toxicity of metal and aldehydes, as well as the pulmonary health effects, including inflammation, of using new and emerging electronic cigarette devices among young adults. She is also interested in airborne microplastics and was awarded NIOSH pilot funding to assess occupational exposures to microfibers—a common type of microplastic—among garment industry workers. 

As a NIEHS-FDA K99/R00 grantee, Dr. Aherrera is investigating the exposure and toxicity of metal and aldehydes, as well as the pulmonary health effects, including inflammation, of using electronic cigarettes among young adults. She is also interested in airborne microplastics and was awarded NIOSH funding to assess occupational exposure to microfibers—a common type of microplastic—among garment industry workers. Ultimately, Dr. Aherrera’s goals are to contribute to reducing environmental health inequities in vulnerable and disproportionately exposed populations. 

She received a DrPH (2019) and MPH (2015) from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health before assuming the role of a postdoctoral fellow in the school's Department of Environmental Health and Engineering. 

Dr. Brown joins the department as an Assistant Professor of Informatics and Genetics and is broadly interested in the development and application of statistical and computational methods in bioinformatics and genetics with a focus on complex traits. He is particularly interested in large-scale exploratory data analysis, causal inference, omics data integration, and cross-ancestry analysis. Dr. Brown and his research group employ techniques to analyze medically linked genetic and multi-omic studies, single-cell sequencing, and CRISPR-based screen data with the goal of understanding the mechanism of complex and common diseases. The long-term goal of his research group is to build large-scale, causally grounded, multifactorial disease models that can be used to predict intervention effects, identify key pathways, and enable precision medicine.

He received a PhD from the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley (2016) before working as a computational biologist at Verily Life Sciences. In 2019, he returned to academia as a Data Science Institute fellow at Columbia University and a postdoctoral fellow at the New York Genome Center.