The quality of our faculty represents the heart of our academic mission. The following talented new faculty members have joined the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health.
Leila Barraza, J.D., M.P.H., is an Assistant Professor of Public Health Policy and Management. Prior to joining the College of Public Health, she was Deputy Director of the Network for Public Health Law-Western Region Office and a Fellow and Adjunct Professor in the Public Health Law and Policy Program at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University. During her tenure at the Network for Public Health Law, Barraza provided legal technical assistance to public health practitioners and attorneys positioned throughout the country. She has been published in several scholarly journals, including the Duke Forum for Law & Social Change, Jurimetrics Journal, and the Journal for Law, Medicine, and Ethics. Barraza has presented at national and local conferences on a variety of critical public health law issues. She served as a Law Clerk for the Arizona Court of Appeals, Division One. Prior to attending law school, Barraza worked for the Center for Rural Health at the UA Zuckerman College of Public Health, providing assistance to rural and tribal hospitals and clinics. Barraza received a J.D., with a Certificate in Law, Science, and Technology, from the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law and her M.P.H. from the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health. She has a B.A. in Biological Sciences from the University of Southern California.
Melanie Bell, Ph.D., M.S., is an Associate Professor of Biostatistics. Prior to joining the College of Public Health, she was the senior biostatistician at the University of Sydney with a cancer trials group focusing on quality of life and other patient reported outcomes. Dr. Bell taught several workshops while in Australia, including Design and Analysis of Quality of Life Trials, Avoiding Common Statistical Errors, and Designing Intervention Studies. Before joining the University of Sydney, she was a senior lecturer at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Her research focus is methods for handling missing data in longitudinal studies, clinical trials, cluster randomized trials, and on quality improvement in research methods. In addition to her methodological research, she has collaborated in a variety of fields including cancer, psychology, sexual health, alcohol, physical therapy, physical activity, nutrition, and developmental biology. Dr. Bell earned her Ph.D. in biostatistics from the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in 2002, an M.S. in mathematics in 1992 from Northern Arizona University, and an A.B. in mathematics from Occidental College in Los Angeles, in 1990.
Kristen Pogreba-Brown, Ph.D., M.P.H., is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology. Prior to joining the faculty, Dr. Pogreba-Brown was director of the Student Aid for Field Epidemiology Response (SAFER) team at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health. In addition to continuing to oversee the SAFER program, her research projects are focused on foodborne diseases and improving methodology to respond to outbreak investigations. She is currently working on a project to identify the risk factors related to foodborne infection and specific chronic outcomes following acute disease. Dr. Pogreba-Brown works with various county health departments in Arizona as well as the state health department to aid in outbreak investigations and serves on the state’s Foodborne Taskforce Committee. Dr. Pogreba-Brown earned her Ph.D. (2009) and M.P.H. (2003) in Epidemiology from the UA Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, and a B.S. in Microbiology (2000) from the University of Arizona.
Jin J. Zhou, Ph.D., M.S., is an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics. Prior to joining the College of Public Health, Dr. Zhou was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biostatistics at Harvard University and collaborated closely with fellows at the Channing’s Laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital on the genetic epidemiology study for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Her research concerns the role of genetic, epigenetic and environmental factors in the development of complex diseases, including cancers. It involves both methodological development in modeling biological data and hands-on data analysis. Her current research focuses on building mathematical/statistical models and efficient user-friendly software to better utilize various types of high-throughput data, also known as big data, and systematically understand the heterogeneity of complex diseases, therefore to facilitate the evolution into the era of tailored therapy and personalized medicine. She received a Ph.D. in Biomathematics in 2010 from the University of California, Los Angeles, an M.S. in Applied Mathematics from Nankai University in China and a B.S. from Nanjing Normal University in China.
