Congratulations to professor Bryan Shepherd and PhD candidate Zhuohui “Jeffrey” Liang on the publication of “Temporal trends in tuberculosis and time from enrolment in care to antiretroviral therapy initiation: A multicountry cohort study from Latin America,” published in the October print issue of the International Journal of Infectious Diseases. Former senior biostatistician Ahra Kim (now a PhD candidate in the Department of Health Policy) is a co-author of the paper, as are investigators from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, and Peru, plus Vanderbilt’s Division of Infectious Diseases, Weill Cornell Medicine’s Center for Global Health, and Harvard Medical School’s Division of Global Health Equity. The researchers investigated trends in time to HIV treatment initiation among people presenting to care with and without tuberculosis. Zhuohui Liang’s responsibilities included performing analyses and initial drafting of the manuscript.
Dr. Shepherd is also principal investigator of a project funded by a five-year, $4 million R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that will employ “generative artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to create hundreds of thousands of simulated HIV patients to broadly aid and stimulate longitudinal observational studies of this chronic condition” (VUMC News, November 3) Professor of biostatistics, bioinformatics, and computer science Bradley Malin is co-PI of this study, and associate professor of biostatistics, bioinformatics, and medicine Peter Rebeiro is a co-investigator.
Zhuohui Liang earned his bachelor’s degree in public health from Shandong University and his MS in biostatistics from Columbia University. His activities as a member of the Vanderbilt Biostatistics PhD cohort have included delivering a talk about synthetic data generation in March 2024 at IWSHOD2024 (the 26th International Workshop on HIV and Hepatitis Observational Databases) in Portugal, on a CCASAnet (Caribbean, Central & South America Network for HIV Epidemiology) collaboration that involved the above faculty.
Thumbnail photo courtesy of the IeDEA (International Epidemiology Databases to Evaluate AIDS) Global Cohort Consortium