Elizabeth B. Claus, MD, PhD is Professor and Director of Medical Research in the Yale University School of Public Health as well as Attending Neurosurgeon and Director of Stereotactic Radiosurgery within the Department of Neurosurgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She is a member of the board of advisors for the Acoustic Neuroma Association (ANA) as well as the Central Brain Tumor Registry of the United States (CBTRUS). Dr. Claus' work is focused in cancer and genetic epidemiology with an emphasis on the development of risk models for breast and brain tumors. She is the overall PI of the Meningioma Consortium, the Meningioma Genome-Wide Association Study, and the Yale Acoustic Neuroma Study as well as a co-investigator of the GLIOGENE (Genes for Glioma) and International Glioma Case/Control (GICC) projects. In addition to her research activities, Dr. Claus is a Board-certified neurosurgeon who completed her residency in neurosurgery at Yale-New Haven Hospital and her fellowship in neurosurgical oncology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Her clinical focus is on the treatment of meningioma, glioma, acoustic neuroma and brain metastases.  Claus launched the International Low-Grade Glioma (LGG) Registry in 2016 to discover why some people develop LGG, a slow growing but malignant brain tumor primarily affecting young adults, while others do not. The goal of the registry is also to learn more about the effect of this diagnosis and the associated treatments on daily life including the ability to work, drive, sleep, exercise, or take care of oneself and/or a family member. Recently Dr. Claus and a team of fellow scientists received funds from the National Cancer Institute to investigate the molecular evolution of LGG. The project, OPTimIzing engageMent in discovery of molecular evolution of low grade glioma” or OPTIMUM, will enroll 500 participants diagnosed with LGG and who have had two or more surgeries for their glioma and genotype these tumors to establish a comprehensive genomic characterization of the glioma tumors across time.

Denise Esserman joined the Yale School of Public Health faculty in 2014 as an associate professor of biostatistics. She is interested in methods related to clustered randomized trials and the impact of the ICC and other factors on calculating sample size. As a member of the Yale Center for Analytical Sciences, she collaborates with a number of departments at the Yale School of Medicine, including the Clinical and Translational Science Award Program, Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, and the Cancer Center. She has reviewed articles for the American Journal of Epidemiology, Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology; Statistics in Biopharmaceutical Research; Clinical Trials; and Obesity. Esserman earned her doctorate at Columbia University and has since taught at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Dr. Skyler Jackson (he/him) conducts research focusing on the ways individuals’ social identities (e.g., race, gender, sexual orientation) shape their everyday lives and influence health and well-being. In particular, he is interested in how experiences of stigma—if not adequately coped with—interfere with psychological functioning and contribute to health disparities. Relying on a broad range of methodological approaches (e.g., microlongitudinal, experimental, qualitative), Dr. Jackson’s current projects examine complex, understudied manifestations of stigma across sexual, racial, and gender minority populations, including (a) intersectional stress among individuals holding multiple marginalized identities (e.g., LGBTQ+ people of color, Black women), and (b) border identity stress among populations holding identities that defy binary categorization (e.g., bisexuals, multiracial people, nonbinary individuals). Increasingly, Dr. Jackson’s work has focused on the development of culturally-attuned, stigma coping interventions to address the intersectional determinants of health among multiply-marginalized populations. Supporting his research in this area, Dr. Jackson recently received an NIMH K01 Career Development Award entitled, “Intersectional stigma, mental health, and HIV risk among US GBM of color” (1K01MH122316-01A1).

Dr. Fan Li is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Yale School of Public Health. He received his PhD in Biostatistics from Duke University in 2019, and joined the Yale Biostatistics faculty in July, 2019. Dr. Li’s research interests include statistical methods for randomized clinical trials, observational studies and a combination of both. He is an expert in the design, monitoring, analysis of parallel-arm, crossover and stepped-wedge cluster randomized trials, which are increasingly seen in pragmatic clinical trials embedded in the health care delivery systems. He has also contributed novel propensity score methods and software to estimate average causal effects with observational data, aimed at improving overlap and internal validity. His recent methods research include generalizability of randomized trials to external target populations, confirmatory or exploratory heterogeneity of treatment effects analyses, complex endpoints in cluster randomized trials, as well as novel study designs to address patient-centered clinical research questions. His methodological research has been supported by multiple NIH and PCORI grants/awards.