Building the Bridge to Prevention: Using Epidemiology to Inform an Effective Response to Overdose and Gun Violence

Join the Yale School of Public Health for this Distinguished Speaker event featuring Dr. Magdalena Cerdá. Dr. Cerdá is a Professor at the Department of Population Health at NYU Langone Health, where she directs the Epidemiology Division and the NYU Center for Opioid Epidemiology and Policy. Her work integrates approaches from social and psychiatric epidemiology to examine how social contexts and drug and health policies shape drug use and urban violence. Current funded research focuses on state and community-level policy and social drivers of opioid-related harms, including work on the impact of municipal harm reduction laws on overdose, and an evaluation of the first sanctioned overdose prevention centers in the United States. Dr. Cerdá has also published extensively on the application of novel methods, including machine learning and agent-based modeling, to the prediction of overdose risk and the evaluation of social and policy drivers of overdose and violence. By conducting work in these areas, she hopes her research can inform evidence-based policies to improve population health.