People

CORE STAFF

Dr. Alec Chan-Golston – Director

Alec Chan-Golston, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Public Health at the University of California, Merced. Raised in Fresno, California, his current research focuses on Bayesian spatial statistics and its application to Public Health. He has extensive statistical experience with both academic and cross-sector collaborations. Previous projects include work with several County Public Health Departments, school districts, and Community-Based Organizations.

Alec received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Biostatistics, as well as a B.S. in Applied Mathematics and Statistics, from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Methodological Expertise:

• Hierarchical Modeling
• Missing Data Analysis
• Spatial Statistics
• Bayesian Modeling
• Complex Survey Data
• Big Data
• and more..

Dr. Yueqi Yan  - Chief Biostatistician

Yueqi Yan, Ph.D., is the Chief Biostatistician of the Biostatistics and Data Support Center at UC Merced. His methodological expertise includes longitudinal design, finite mixture model, survival analysis, multilevel modeling, structural equation modeling, and generalized linear model. He has over 10 years of program evaluation experiences with federally funded research projects in the areas of children’s mental health prevention and intervention services, parenting programs, and family recovery services.

Yueqi grew up in China. He received his Ph.D. in social welfare and M.S.W. from University of Kansas.

Methodological Expertise:

• Longitudinal analysis
• Experimental / quasi-experimental design
• Finite mixture model
• Survival analysis
• Multilevel modeling
• Structural equation modeling
• Generalized linear model
• And more...

Dr. Sidra Goldman-Mellor - Founding Director and Consultant

Sidra Goldman-Mellor, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Public Health whose research combines epidemiology and psychology methods to study mental health and suicidal behavior. She has published extensively on these topics using a variety of secondary data sources, including complex survey data, longitudinal cohort data, and hospital record data.

Sidra grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Sidra received her Ph.D. in Epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2012, and her B.A. in Anthropology from Cornell University in 2003.

Methodological Expertise:

• Epidemiologic study design
• Longitudinal models
• Analysis of complex survey data
• Propensity score matching
• Multilevel Modeling
• And more...

More about her substantive expertise and published work can be found here.

CONSULTING STAFF

Dr. Jessica Trounstine

Jessica Trounstine, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Political Science who studies local politics in the United States. Her work uses survey experiments, GIS mapping, instrumental variable analysis, survival analysis, ecological inference, and historical primary source analysis to study the process and quality of political representation in cities, suburbs, and rural America.

Jessica grew up in San Jose, California. She received her B.A. in political science from UC Berkeley in 1998 and her Ph.D. in political science from UC San Diego in 2004. Jessica worked as an assistant professor of political and public affairs at Princeton University from 2004-2009.

Methodological Expertise:

• Experiments
• Instrumental variable models
• Event history models
• Spatial models
• Case studies
• Multilevel modeling
• Regression discontinuity designs
• And more…

Dr. Sandie Ha

Sandie Ha, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Public Health at the University of California, Merced. Her research focuses on studying how various environmental exposures (e.g., air pollution, extreme temperature, pesticides) affect pregnancy and perinatal health outcomes including but not limited to gestational complications, stillbirth, preterm birth, and birth defects. She’s also interested in investigating how exposures during windows of developmental plasticity (e.g. pregnancy and early life) influences the risk of neurodevelopment in early childhood. Her other research interests include cardiovascular complications, asthma, cancer, and health disparity.

Sandie recieved her Ph.D. in Epidemiology and M.P.H. at the University of Florida, Gainesville. She received her B.S. in Biology/Physiology at the University of Washington, Seattle. 

Methodological Expertise:

• Epidemiologic study design
• Observational studies
• Repeated measures
• Complex survey data
• Big data
• Spatial analyses / GIS data
• Case-crossover analyses
• Meta-analysis
• Survival analysis
• And more...

Dr. Irenee Beattie

Irenee Beattie, Ph.D., has focused her research on the sociology of education, social inequality (race, gender and class), adolescent transitions to adulthood, and law and social policy. A series of current projects examine variation in the effects of social capital on college outcomes by race, gender, and first generation college student status. Prior to attending graduate school, she was a Sixth grade teacher in East Palo Alto, CA through the Teach for America program, which solidified her longstanding interest in educational equality.

Irenee earned her B.A. in Social Psychology with a minor in Women’s Studies from Tufts University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from University of Arizona.

Methodological Expertise:

• Analysis of complex survey data
• Longitudinal methods
• General linear models
• Event history (discrete-time) models
• And more..