January 26, 2015 – Dr. Rotheram provided the Keynote Address for CHIPTS’ Cross-Core meeting, focusing on her work with community health workers in South Africa.
CHIPTS Methods Seminar – UCLA-Semel Institute Center for Community Health
Sudipto Banerjee, PhD
Professor and Chair
Dept. of Biostatistics
UCLA Fielding School of Public Health
Tuesday, February 3, 2-3pm
Center for Community Health, UCLA Wilshire Center
10920 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 350, Conference Room
Advances in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and related software have led to a burgeoning of spatial-temporal databases. Statisticians and spatial analysts today routinely encounter situations where they seek to model relationships among variables across space and time. In recent times interest has turned to inferring about rates of change of health outcomes over space and time. Why are such questions relevant and how should we estimate them? One example considers analyzing monthly hospitalization rates aggregated over the counties in California where hospital management seeks to carry out inference on gradients of the temporal process, while at the same time accounting for spatial similarities across neighboring regions. Another example (an extension) is to analyze spatial-temporal gradients for environmental pollutants to understand the nature of dispersal of pollutants. Here, we are interested in directional rates of change over space at any given time, temporal gradients at any given location and even “mixed” gradients, e.g., how the temporal rate of change varies over space. We will work within a fully Bayesian inferential paradigm without unnecessary, and potentially inflexible, parametric modeling assumptions and obtain the full posterior predictive distribution for these gradients using process-based models.
(Co-authors: Harrison Quick and Bradley P. Carlin)
LOS ANGELES — High on a ridge here, up a series of winding roads from Sunset Boulevard, up where coyotes skulk into backyards, up and away from the sprawling megalopolis of nearly four million people, Joel Simkhai recently bought himself a tear-down.
The house is a white cube, three bedrooms and two baths. There is a pergola and there is an oval pool. The pergola and the oval pool and the ugly white cube do not much matter because the house was purchased for one reason — and that is its 15,911-square-foot lot.
From this multimillion-dollar apron of land overlooking Los Angeles can be seen a commanding panorama. It extends in a broad and vertiginous sweep from the spine of the Santa Monica Mountains across the flat Los Angeles Basin, east to the high-rises of downtown and west to the scimitar arc of the Pacific coastline.
To read the full article, click here.
https://chipts.ucla.edu/get-involved/join-a-study/
The UCLA CARE Center is currently enrolling participants for a 2 year study looking at the safety and acceptability of an injectable drug that may be used to prevent HIV
• HIV negative?
• Between 18 and 65?
• At low risk for HIV?
For more Information, about this study, visit http://tiny.cc/hptn077
Call 310-557-9062 or email careoutreach@mednet.ucla.edu to schedule a screening visit
January 8, 2015 – Ms. Ayako Miyashita, Esq., presented to the Los Angeles County Commission on HIV as part of the CHIPTS HIV Research and Community Colloquia Series on Thursday, January 8, 2015. Her presentation focused on addressing the following questions: What is HIV criminalization? How are people living with HIV targeted for criminal prosecution in California? What can we do about it? The presentation addressed the legal
framework for HIV criminalization, the policy considerations for these laws, and what local leaders are currently doing to make a change in California. The presentation included an engaging panel discussion, which included Mr. Aaron Fox from Los Angeles LGBT Center, Ms. Craig Pulsipher from AIDS Project Los Angeles, and Mr. Marco Castro-Bojorquez from Lambda Legal.
Ms. Miyashita is the Inaugural Brian Belt HIV Law & Policy Fellow at the Williams Institute. She currently works on law and policy matters that impact people living with HIV. In her previous positions, Ayako provided direct legal services to low-income clients living with HIV/AIDS in San
Francisco and, most recently, at Inner City Law Center, a non-profit legal services provider based in Los Angeles’ Skid Row area. Ayako earned her J.D. from UC Berkeley School of Law, after receiving her B.A. from UC Santa Cruz.
Aaron Fox, MPM, is the Director of State Health Equity and Policy at the Los Angeles LGBT Center. Mr. Fox focuses his work with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) and underserved communities; advocates for effective policies that continue to support access to quality culturally competent health care; and provides education to the community on changing health policies and funding streams.
Craig Pulsipher, MPP, MSW, is the State Affairs Specialist at AIDS Project Los Angeles. Craig oversees HIV and healthcare policy, legislation, budget and political strategy at the state level and participates in community collaborations on a broad range of HIV and health related issues.
Marco Castro-Bojorquez is a Community Educator for the Western Region for Lambda Legal, a national legal organization working for full recognition of the civil rights of LGBT people and people with HIV.
CHIPTS hosts a monthly HIV Research and Community Colloquia Series in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Commission on HIV to highlight current issues and conversations surrounding HIV. Click here for past lectures and check out the events page for more information on future Colloquia presentations!
King Kennard Holmes, MD, PhD
Director, Research and Faculty Development, Department of Global Health
Professor of Global Health and Medicine
Adjunct Professor of Microbiology and Epidemiology
Director, Center for AIDS and STD
PI, Center for AIDS Research; and PI, I-TECH
University of Washington
“What you need to know about the STDs that more than half of your patients have”
CHIPTS Methods Seminar – UCLA-Semel Institute Center for Community Health
How to Collect Longitudinal Social Network Data in Unbounded Networks of Homeless Youth
Eric Rice, Ph.D.
Dr. Rice is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Southern California. He has been conducting research in the area of homeless youth since 2003. He has more than 60 publications, including publications in top journals such as American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Adolescent Health, and Pediatrics. His areas of research include social network theory, social network analysis, and the application of social network methods to behavioral health and prevention research. Dr. Rice is committed to working with communities to help end adolescent homelessness.
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Game of Phones: A Song of Daily-reports with Missing Observations and the Models that Analyze Them
W. Scott Comulada, Dr.P.H.
Assistant Professor-in-Residence
UCLA Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences
Abstract:
Cell-phone based ecological momentary assessment (CEMA) is an exciting new data collection method. Illicit drug use, sexual behavior, and other HIV-transmission behaviors are reported on a daily basis and in the moment through an electronic device that is already embedded in individuals’ daily routines. The benefits of EMA are realized without the burden of an additional data collection tool. With the capacity to track behaviors at great frequency comes an unwelcome companion of traditional longitudinal studies: missing data. In particular, missing data that is dependent on data not collected by the researcher is problematic, referred to as data not missing at random (NMAR). For example, individuals may not fill out scheduled CEMA on days they are using drugs. Standard statistical models do not adjust for NMAR data and lead to incorrect conclusions. In treatment settings, NMAR patterns overlap with engagement issues and are of interest in their own right. Yet NMAR models have been underutilized due in part to the inability to implement them in standard statistical software packages. Implementation issues have been addressed with the advent of JAGS and other readily available Bayesian software that accommodates NMAR models. A greater awareness of NMAR modeling options in the research community is needed. Towards this goal, I will give an introduction to missing data issues and NMAR models for CEMA data. JAGS code will be provided. Models will be illustrated on CEMA data from pilot studies on youth in outpatient drug treatment and HIV-positive adults. This is joint work with Robert Weiss.
W. Scott Comulada is an assistant professor-in-residence in the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and a member of the CHIPTS methods core. He is part of a cross-disciplinary team of behavioral interventionists, computer scientists, and statisticians that collaborate on mobile phone-based research projects in the behavioral sciences. Dr. Comulada is also a statistician with extensive experience in the analysis of longitudinal and social network data.
[Download not found]
War is perhaps one of the most challenging situations that a human being can experience. The physical, emotional, cognitive and psychological demands of a combat environment place enormous stress on even the best-prepared military personnel. Numerous reports indicate that the incidence of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in returning OEF/OIF military personnel is creating a significant healthcare challenge. This situation has served to motivate research on how to better develop and disseminate evidence-based treatments for PTSD and other psycho social conditions. In this regard, Virtual Reality delivered exposure therapy for PTSD is currently being used with initial reports of positive outcomes. This presentation will detail how virtual reality applications are being designed and implemented across various points in the military deployment cycle to prevent, identify and treat combat-related PTSD in OIF/OEF Service Members and Veterans. We will also present recent work being done with artificially intelligent virtual humans that serve in the role as “Virtual Patients” for clinical training of healthcare providers in both military and civilian settings and as online healthcare guides for breaking down barriers to care. The projects in these areas that will presented have been developed at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies, a U.S. Army University Affiliated Research Center, and will provide a diverse overview of how virtual reality is being used to deliver exposure therapy, assess PTSD and cognitive function, provide stress resilience training prior to deployment and its use in breaking down barriers to care. The talk will conclude with a discussion of how the urgency of war has provided the context and funding for the advancement of these technologies that will soon translate to civilian needs.
Speaker Bio: Albert “Skip” Rizzo is a Clinical and Neuro- Psychologist, and Associate Director of the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies. Skip conducts research on the design, development and evaluation of VR systems targeting the areas of clinical assessment, treatment and rehabilitation. In the psychological domain, he has directed the development/implementation of the Virtual Iraq/Afghanistan VR exposure therapy system for combat-related PTSD and is involved in translating these simulation assets for PTSD assessment and prevention (stress resilience). His cognitive work has addressed the use of VR applications to test and train cognitive functioning. In the motor domain, he develops VR game-based applications to promote rehabilitation in persons with CNS dysfunction (e.g., stroke and TBI). He is also involved in the creation of artificially intelligent virtual human patients for clinical training and for creating online virtual human healthcare guides for breaking down barriers to care in psychological health and TBI.