A few years ago, Giyoung Lee’s family trip to South Korea was almost derailed by a MERS outbreak. Having recently discovered epidemiology through a medical sociology course, she used her new knowledge to follow reports from the World Health Organization in the Korean newspapers and eventually convinced her parents that it was safe to travel.
Now a student in the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases she has immersed herself in research. Last summer, she interned with Professor Peter Krause comparing incidence of the tick-borne pathogens, Borrelia miyamotoi, to that of Borrelia burgdorferi (which causes Lyme disease) to see if the ticks are spreading the two pathogens at the same speed geographically and doing baseline work toward the development of a diagnostic test.
Giyoung has also been doing a secondary data analysis of an m-Health intervention study in Kampala, Uganda, looking specifically at pediatric tuberculosis evaluation. Working with Professor Luke Davis and Research Scientist Mari Armstrong-Hough, Giyoung first learned some practical lessons about study design and data cleaning. “You can plan a study all you want, but as the paper trail shows, things go wrong.”
The original study evaluated use of mobile devices in tuberculosis household contact investigations. Children under the age of 5 are not likely to be diagnosed and are particularly vulnerable to progressing to severe disease. Giyoung is looking for predictors, such as age, household income and size of the household, to identify those children and get them into clinics for evaluation. The EMD research community has opened opportunities to do things I didn’t know I could do, says Giyoung. “Their belief in me was a surprise, but I’m appreciative and excited that they’ve pushed me to publish and present this thesis research.”