Research Team

Kurt Petschke is a Research and Project Coordinator for Yale School of Public Health (YSPH) professors David Paltiel and Jody Sindelar. He is also the Program Manager for the Inclusion Body Myositis Disease Registry at Yale (IBMR). As a member of the Health Policy & Management Department and the Public Health Modeling Unit, he provides research, technical and administrative support for a number of research projects, studies, and experiments. As part of his responsibilities, Kurt oversees the IBMR website, Registry, Personalized Index Calculator, and outreach activities for the IBMR project. He also coordinates research projects for Drs. Paltiel and Sindelar, including: monitoring and ensuring compliance of their sponsored research projects; establishing and maintaining close working relationships with other investigators and their relevant research and administrative staff on collaborative projects; participating in research award and Institutional Review Board (IRB) protocol development, submissions and amendments; developing and monitoring project budgets with delegated authority to approve financial transactions for their sponsored projects; ensuring compliance with federal regulations and University policies and procedures; implementation of online surveys, discrete choice experiments, field surveys, and focus groups; assisting with development of content for peer-reviewed manuscripts, scientific and other project reports, project websites, scientific meetings, and conferences as needed.  Prior to coming to Yale in 2004, Kurt was a Grant and Contract Specialist at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Office of Sponsored Research Services. He has also been a Transportation Planner/Analyst with the Genesee Transportation Council regional Metropolitan Planning Organization in Rochester, New York; a Service Analyst with the Rochester-Genesee Regional Transportation Authority; and a Meteorologist Technician with Oceanroutes, a global ship routing company in Sunnyvale, California.Kurt studied Meteorology, Atmospheric Science, and Geography at Penn State University and then at the University at Albany, where he graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in 1986.

Dr. Kevin C. O’Connor is an Associate Professor of Neurology and Immunobiology at Yale School of Medicine. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry at Tufts Medical School. He took his post-doctoral training in Immunology at Harvard Medical School where he also spent several years on the faculty as an Assistant Professor. His investigative interests are in human translational immunology and neurology. He and his group are specifically interested in defining the mechanisms by which B cells, and the antibodies they produce, affect tissue damage in autoimmunity. To this end they are engaged in understanding how particular B cell subsets initiate and sustain autoimmunity. He and his team were among the first to characterize tertiary lymphoid tissue and the adaptive immune response in germ cell tumors and meningiomas. They also described the molecular characteristics of B cells and plasma cells that populate the muscle tissue of patients with myositis. They refined the role of Epstein-Barr virus in the multiple sclerosis (MS) brain and have further defined the role of humoral immunity in children with MS. Recently, he and his team identified a network of B cells and autoantibodies that populate the MS central nervous system. His current research focus includes further defining the immunopathology of myasthenia gravis (MG). He and his team demonstrated that B cell depletion therapy has sustained efficacy in MG. They were the first to show that MG-derived AChR antigen specific T cells belong to the pro-inflammatory Th17 subset. They also determined that MG subjects harbor defects in B cell tolerance checkpoints that correlate with abnormalities in the naïve B cells repertoire. They most recently identified the autoantibody-producing cells in MuSK MG. Their current focus is on further defining the mechanisms of autoantibody production in MG with the aim of improving therapeutic approaches.

The objective that guides Dr. Paltiel's scholarly activities is to promote a reasoned approach to decision making and resource allocation in public health and medicine. Trained in the field of Operations Research, Dr. Paltiel designs and implements policy models and cost-effectiveness analyses. He has a special interest and expertise in HIV/AIDS and has published broadly on the cost-effectiveness of testing, prevention, treatment, and care, both in the United States and around the world.

Dr Bhaskar Roy is a specialist in neuromuscular disorders. His clinical areas of expertise includes muscular dystrophies, inflammatory myopathies (polymyositis, dermatomyositis, inclusion body myositis), autoimmune neuromuscular disorders, including inflammatory neuropathies. He did his neurology residency from the University of Connecticut and completed his fellowship from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School. He is board certified in neurology (2016) and neuromuscular medicine (2018) by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (ABPN) and in electrodiagnostic medicine (2018), and in Neuromuscular Ultrasound (2020) by the American Board of Electrodiagnostic Medicine (ABEM).