Posted 07/17/2007

Eight tenure-track faculty members join
 Arnold School for fall semester
 

Eight persons will join the faculty of the Arnold School of Public Health as tenure-track faculty members this fall. 

Five of the new members are in the Department of Health Promotion, Education, and Behavior (HPEB).  They are: 

Dr. Sonya J. Jones, a research assistant professor and deputy director of the Center for Research in Nutrition and Health Disparities, and Dr. Heather M. Brandt, a research assistant professor and co-investigator in the South Carolina Cancer Disparities Community Network, are already on the HPEB roster.  They have received tenure-track appointments beginning in August. 

Jones earned a bachelor’s degree in Latin American Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  She also earned a doctorate in nutrition from UNC-Chapel Hill.  She was an assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville before coming to USC in September 2005. 
 

An Iowa native, Brandt earned a bachelor’s degree in health promotion from the University of Iowa in Iowa City.  She came to Columbia in 1997 where she earned her master’s and doctorate degrees in HPEB from the Arnold School. Brandt’s research interests include cancer disparities among underserved populations, cancer prevention and control, and human papillomavirus (HPV)-associated cancers. 

Dr. Katrina M. Walsemann comes to USC from the University of Michigan Population Studies Center where she has been a National Institutes on Aging postdoctoral research fellow. She earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of California-Davis.  She earned a master’s degree and doctorate in Health Behavior and Health Education from the University of Michigan School of Public Health.  

Dr. Clare Barrington has been a research assistant and study coordinator at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore where she recently earned her doctorate from the Department of International Health.  She also earned a master’s degree from the same department and a bachelor’s degree with a concentration in International Health and Development Studies from Brown University. 

Dr.  Lucy Annang has been an assistant professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Department of Health Behaviors and an associate scientist in the Minority Health and Research Center.  She was the former director of graduate programs.  She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Emory University and a master’s degree in health behavior and a doctorate in health education and health promotion from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. 

Dr. Matthew Kostek, who is joining the Arnold School’s Department of Exercise Science, was a postdoctoral fellow at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington where he studied the molecular and genetics aspects of skeletal muscle.  He earned a bachelor’s degree in applied science from Youngstown State University in Ohio. He earned a master’s degree in exercise physiology/cardiac rehabilitation from Ball State University in Muncie, IN and a doctorate in kinesiology from the University of Maryland. 

Dr. Jiajia Zhang and Dr. Hongmei Zhang are joining the faculty of the Arnold School’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.  

Hongmei Zhang has been an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of West Florida in Pensacola. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electronic engineering at the Nanjing Research Institute of Technology in Naming, China. She also earned a master’s degree in mathematics at Truman State University in Kirksville, MO and a master’s degree and a doctorate in statistics from Iowa State University, Ames, IA. Her research interests are statistics in bioinformatics, statistical methodology development, statistical modeling, and Bayesian data analyses. 

Jiajia Zhang comes from the Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada where she completed her doctoral studies and presented her dissertation in June.  She has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in statistics from East China Normal University in Shanghai, China. Her research interests include accelerated failure time models, frailty model, mixture cure models, statistical computation and semiparametric estimation methods.