Our core team.

Shirley Wang, PhD, ScM | Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School

Shirley Wang is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Associate Epidemiologist in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women's Hospital. She is a pharmacoepidemiologist focused on developing innovative, non-traditional analytic methods to understand the safety and effectiveness of medication use in clinical care as well as facilitating appropriate use of complex methods for analyzing large observational healthcare data. To that end, she has developed enhancements to epidemiologic study designs and analytic methods as well as led efforts to guide appropriate use of complex methods for analyzing large observational healthcare data. Shirley has been involved with the US Food and Drug Administration’s Sentinel Initiative since 2011 and her methods work has been recognized with awards from two international research societies. She recently led a joint task force for the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology (ISPE) and the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) focused on improving the confidence of decision-makers in utilizing real world evidence through increasing transparency and reproducibility of healthcare database studies. She is also a writing group member for a National Academy of Medicine white paper on executing and operationalizing open science.

Sebastian Schneeweiss, MD, ScD | Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School

Sebastian Schneeweiss is Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Harvard Medical School and Vice Chief of the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics of the Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a world-leading research and training center. His research is funded by multiple NIH, PCORI, and FDA grants and focuses on the comparative effectiveness and safety of biopharmaceuticals. He has developed analytic methods to improve the scientific validity of epidemiologic analyses using complex longitudinal healthcare databases particularly for newly marketed medical products. Applying such methods transparently and in rapid cycles for sequential medication effectiveness monitoring is the overarching theme of his research. His work is published in >300 articles, many of them in high-ranking journals. He is Aetion Inc.’s Science Lead were he develops a worldwide network of rapid-cycle analytics platforms that produces evidence fit for decision making in healthcare. Dr. Schneeweiss is Director of the Harvard-Brigham Drug Safety Research Center funded by FDA/CDER and Co-Chair of the Methods Core of the FDA Sentinel program. He is voting consultant to the FDA Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee and was inaugural member of the Methods Committee of the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute. He was President of the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology, inaugural member of the PCORI Methods Committee and is Fellow of the American College of Epidemiology, the American College of Clinical Pharmacology, and the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology. At Harvard he teaches courses on Database Analytics for Pharmacoepidemiology and on Effectiveness Research in Longitudinal Healthcare Databases among others. He received his medical training at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich and his doctoral degree in pharmacoepidemiology from Harvard.

Jessica Franklin, PhD | Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School

Jessica Franklin, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and biostatistician in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Her research focuses on developing and applying statistical methods for the study of medicines, including comparative effectiveness and safety and drug utilization. Her methodological interests are in causal inference and hierarchical modeling. Dr. Franklin is leading the RCT DUPLICATE project, which aims to build an empirical basis for causal inference methods applied to real world data analyses of medications through the large-scale replication of randomized trials in real world data. She received her Bachelor’s degree in mathematics at the University of Georgia and her doctorate in biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Krista Huybrechts, PhD, MS | Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School

Krista F. Huybrechts, M.S., Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an epidemiologist in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She also holds an appointment as adjunct Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health. Dr. Huybrechts teaches Drug Epidemiology (EP748) at Boston University School of Public Health and guest lectures in several courses at Harvard Medical School and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She currently serves on the Board of the International Society of Pharmacoepidemiology and Therapeutic Risk Management. Her research centers on the utilization, comparative safety and effectiveness of prescription medications in pregnant women and their offspring, and on studying the outcomes of medications for mental health disorders in vulnerable populations. She also has a special interest in research methodology and innovative research applications in relation to both these fields of study. Dr. Huybrechts graduated magna cum laude with a Master of Science degree in Economics from the University of Antwerp, Belgium where she also worked as a researcher in health economics. Prior to completing a doctoral degree in epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health, Dr. Huybrechts held several positions in pharmacoeconomics and outcomes research, both in Europe and the US. Her research projects focused primarily on psychiatry and neurology, and covered a broad spectrum of research designs, including clinical trials, naturalistic studies, retrospective data analyses, and decision-analytic simulation models.

Joshua Gagne, PharmD, ScD | Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School

Joshua J Gagne, PharmD, ScD is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and an Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (Harvard Chan).  Josh is Co-Lead of the Methods Core of the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) Sentinel program, Co-Director of the Pharmacoepidemiology Program at Harvard Chan, and Co-Director of the Harvard-Brigham Drug Safety and Risk Management Research Center funded by the FDA.  His research centers on methods for generating post-approval comparative safety and effectiveness evidence for new medical products.  Josh teaches courses in pharmacoepidemiology and comparative effectiveness research at Harvard Chan and directs a course through Harvard Catalyst, the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center.  His research is supported by the FDA, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Reagan-Udall Foundation, and pharmaceutical companies.  Josh is a recipient of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research Award for Excellence in Application of Pharmacoeconomics and Health Outcomes Research.  He serves on the editorial boards of Drug Safety and Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety and is an Associate Editor for PCORI.

Elisabetta Patorno, MD, DrPH | Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School

Elisabetta Patorno, MD, DrPH, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a faculty member in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Her work focuses on the assessment of safety and effectiveness of therapeutics through the application of epidemiologic and statistical methods for confounding adjustment in non-experimental studies. Her major area of interest is the pharmacoepidemiology of neurological and cardiovascular diseases. Additional areas of interest include utilization, comparative safety and effectiveness of therapeutics and procedures in the perioperative setting and of selected psychotropic medications. Dr. Patorno graduated magna cum laude with a Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy) and she completed her training in Preventive Medicine in Italy. She earned a master degree in Public Health and a doctorate in Pharmacoepidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health.

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Yinzhu Jin, MS, MPH | Research Specialist

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Mufaddal Mahesri, MD, MPH | Research Specialist

Ajinkya Pawar, PhD, MS | Research Specialist

Sushama Kattinakere Sreedhara, MBBS, MSPH | Research Specialist

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Lily Bessette | Research Assistant

Kristina Stefanini | Research Assistant

Nileesa Gautam | Research Assistant

Adrian Santiago Ortiz | Research Assistant

Mimi Zakarian | Research Assistant

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Alumni

​Moa Lee | Former Research Specialist at DoPE | Current PhD Candidate at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Julie Barberio | Former Research Analyst at DoPE | Current MSPH/PhD Candidate at Emory University
Sara Dejene | Former Research Analyst at DoPE | Current MSPH/PhD Candidate at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Jimmy Rogers, MS | Former Research Analyst at DoPE | Current PhD Candidate at Columbia University