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Elizabeth A. Suarez, PhD, MPH

Core Faculty

Elizabeth Suarez is a pharmacoepidemiologist focused on studying the use and safety of medications in pregnancy. She received her PhD in Epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her MPH in Epidemiology from Boston University. After completing her doctoral work, Dr. Suarez held a postdoctoral fellowship with the Sentinel Operations Center at the Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute and Harvard Medical School, where she led and contributed to projects on use of tree-based scan statistics for surveillance of medication use during pregnancy for the FDA Sentinel Initiative. She held a second postdoctoral fellowship with the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where she worked with the Harvard Program on Perinatal and Pediatric Pharmacoepidemiology (H4P) on various studies of medication safety in pregnancy using Medicaid and private insurance claims data. Dr. Suarez’s research is focused on novel methods for studying medication safety in pregnancy using healthcare utilization data, including both insurance claims and electronic health records. Her recent research has involved the safety of antidepressants, other psychotropic medications, and medications for opioid use disorder in pregnancy.

 

Research Profile:

Pharmacoepidemiology, Perinatal Epidemiology, Birth defects, Pregnancy, Mental Health

 

Selected Publications:

  1. Suarez EA, Huybrechts KF, Straub L, Hernández-Díaz S, Jones HE, Connery HS, Davis JM, Gray KJ, Lester B, Terplan M, Mogun H, Bateman BT. Buprenorphine versus Methadone for Opioid Use Disorder in Pregnancy. N Engl J Med. 2022 Dec 1;387(22):2033-2044.
  2. Suarez EA, Nguyen M, Zhang D, Zhao Y, Stojanovic D, Munoz M, Liedtka J, Anderson A, Liu W, Dashevsky I, DeLuccia S, Menzin T, Noble J, Maro JC. Monitoring Drug Safety in Pregnancy with Scan Statistics: A Comparison of Two Study Designs. 2023 Jan 1;34(1):90-98.
  3. Suarez EA, Bateman BT, Hernández-Díaz S, Straub L, Wisner KL, Gray KJ, Pennell PB, Lester B, McDougle CJ, Zhu Y, Mogun H, Huybrechts KF. Association of Antidepressant Use During Pregnancy With Risk of Neurodevelopmental Disorders in Children. JAMA Intern Med. 2022 Oct 3;182(11):1149-60.
  4. Suarez EA, Nguyen M, Zhang D, Zhao Y, Stojanovic D, Munoz M, Liedtka J, Anderson A, Liu W, Dashevsky I, Cole D, DeLuccia S, Menzin T, Noble J, Maro JC. Novel Methods for Pregnancy Drug Safety Surveillance in the FDA Sentinel System. Pharmacoepidemiol Drug Saf. 2022 Jul 24.
  5. Suarez EA, Haug N, Hansbury A, Stojanovic D, Corey C. Prescription medication use and baseline health status of women with live-birth deliveries in a national data network. Am J Obstet Gynecol MFM. 2022 Jan;4(1):100512.
  6. Suarez EA, Boggess K, Engel SM, Stürmer T, Lund JL, Jonsson Funk M. Ondansetron use in early pregnancy and the risk of miscarriage. Pharmacoepidemiol Drug Saf. 2021 Feb;30(2):103-113.