Public Health Faculty Tenured in 2024
Six Mailman School of Public Health professors joined Columbia's tenured faculty in 2024. Tenure is a distinction that recognizes scholarly excellence, demonstrated capacity for imaginative, original work, and great promise for continued contributions at the forefront of one's field.
Adam Sacarny
Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management
Adam Sacarny is a leading economist who studies healthcare productivity, focusing on clinician prescribing practices, hospital performance, and health insurance take-up. By collaborating with state and federal organizations, he has embarked on large-scale field experiments to test novel intervention strategies to improve the U.S. healthcare delivery system.
His research findings include articulating low-cost strategies to make prescribing safer and to increase insurance coverage. He has published in top economics journals, including the American Economic Review and The Review of Economics and Statistics. His work has also been featured in important health policy and medical journals including Health Affairs and JAMA Psychiatry. Dr. Sacarny received the 2019 Publication of the Year Award from AcademyHealth for his research showing that warning letters successfully reduced risky prescribing of antipsychotics for Medicare patients.
Dr. Sacarny holds affiliations with the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). He earned his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and subsequently was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at Harvard University. He joined the Columbia faculty in 2016.
Adam Sacarny's Faculty Profile
Adana Llanos
Associate Professor of Epidemiology
Adana A. M. Llanos is a geneticist, molecular epidemiologist, and health equity scholar who studies the intersection of social and structural and biological drivers of health to understand sociobiological mechanisms that contribute to worse cancer outcomes among vulnerable communities.
Dr. Llanos’ molecular epidemiological work has specifically demonstrated links between adiposity and adipokines and breast cancer. Her scholarship on social and structural drivers of health influencing cancer prognosis focuses on the role of “allostatic load” or the cumulative burden of stress and adversity in engendering health disparities. This work includes the exploration of whether neighborhood-level socioeconomic deprivation and racial residential segregation lead to poorer breast cancer outcomes and investigation into the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic differentially impacted individuals belonging to marginalized groups. Her most recent work focuses on the effects of chemical exposure in personal care products, including hair straightening products and chemical relaxers that are particularly popular among black women, on health. She has received consistent funding for her work, including several NIH grants.
Dr. Llanos earned her PhD in genetics from Howard University and MPH in epidemiology from the Ohio State University. She served on the faculty of Rutgers University before joining the Columbia faculty in 2021.
Barun Mathema
Associate Professor of Epidemiology
Barun Mathema is a leader in the fields of infectious disease epidemiology and molecular epidemiology, with expertise in tuberculosis and other antimicrobial resistant bacteria. His work focuses on the biologic and epidemiologic mechanisms by which drug resistance and transmission of diseases occur.
Dr. Mathema’s scholarship has focused on three primary scientific domains: identifying key drivers of pathogen transmission to guide control efforts; dissecting the mechanism of pathogen emergence, transmission and spatial dispersal; and understanding the impact of pathogen genetic variation on host-pathogen interactions and disease epidemiology. Using whole genome sequencing, Dr. Mathema’s scholarship has modeled the evolution of highly drug-resistant tuberculosis and spatial dynamics in large populations in places such as South Africa, Moldova, and China. Dr. Mathema has also worked on SARS-CoV-2, applying tools of genomic epidemiology to study the transmission and evolution of certain variants during the pandemic. His work has received funding from the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Mathema earned his PhD from Columbia University. He joined the Columbia faculty in 2014.
Barun Mathema's Faculty Profile
Jasmine McDonald
Associate Professor of Epidemiology
Jasmine McDonald is an innovative molecular epidemiologist who focuses on the study of breast cancer risk, especially among minority populations.
She is perhaps best known for her findings on the temporal nature of developmental milestones in the life of a woman—the development of the breasts, the start of menarche, and pregnancy—and breast cancer risk. Another notable research stream is her investigation into the role that childhood infections, especially where the disease proves asymptomatic, play in altering pubertal timing, which has implications for breast cancer risk. Her other work has examined the correlation between prenatal exposure to pesticides and daughter’s breast cancer risk as well as how the use of certain beauty products marketed to women of color impact breast cancer risk and breast cancer pathology. Her work has informed breast cancer risk reduction strategies and programs that aim to modify behaviors for breast cancer prevention. She has received considerable grant funding for her research and has been recognized with numerous honors, including the 2021 Columbia University Presidential Teaching Award for her dedication to mentorship and education.
Dr. McDonald earned her PhD from Harvard University. She joined the Columbia faculty in 2015.
Jasmine McDonald's Faculty Profile
Kara Rudolph
Associate Professor of Epidemiology
Kara Rudolph is a leader in the fields of biostatistics and epidemiology. She develops and applies causal inference methods in the study of social and contextual influence on public health challenges including mental health, violence, and substance abuse in underprivileged urban areas.
A key research focus is on transportability, or the method by which to generalize findings and transport them to new settings. Dr. Rudolph has received numerous awards for her research, including best paper awards from major journals in her field, the Brian MacMahon Early Career Award from the Society for Epidemiological Research, and the Calderon Award for Junior Faculty at the Mailman School.
Dr. Rudolph earned her PhD from Johns Hopkins University. She served on the faculty of the University of California, Davis, before joining the Columbia faculty in 2019.
Kara Rudolph's Faculty Profile
Yifei Sun
Associate Professor of Biostatistics
Yifei Sun focuses on the development of statistical methods to analyze complex datasets such as electronic health records, clinical trials, and observational studies. Her main areas of research are survival analysis, longitudinal data, and statistical learning. One of her most notable contributions is in developing methods for statistical inference of recurring events for electronic health records. Much of her work has tremendous translational value.
Dr. Sun has published in top-tier journals including the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Annals of Applied Statistics, Biometrika, and Biometrics. She has also been recognized with honors including a 2021 “Outstanding Young Researcher Award” from the International Chinese Statistical Association.
Dr. Sun earned her PhD from Johns Hopkins University. She joined the Columbia faculty in 2017.