NIH Director's Seminar Series: Addressing evolving and emerging public health questions with descriptive epidemiology

Friday, January 20, 2023, 12:00 to 1:00pm

The January 2023 lecture in the NIH Director's Seminar Series will be presented by IRP senior investigator Meredith Shiels, Ph.D. Well-conducted surveillance studies have long informed hypotheses related to the causes of cancer; highlighted the population-level impact of exposures and interventions; and guided additional research, prevention efforts, and public health resources. The Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics (DCEG) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has been generating etiologic clues from monitoring cancer trends and mapping cancer mortality for decades. In this lecture, Dr. Shiels will describe her research program, which utilizes a combination of innovative contemporary approaches to confront high-impact public health questions using descriptive analyses and population-based databases. She will describe work that focused on the long-term monitoring of cancer and mortality rates in the U.S, as well as work that responds to emerging public health crises in real time, such as the opioid crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.