Date Sept 02, 2022
Media Contact
Nicole Swenarton | 732-284-6326 | ns1332@ifh.rutgers.edu
The Rutgers Center for Pharmacoepidemiology and Treatment Science extends a warm welcome to two new core faculty members: Elizabeth A. Suarez, PhD, MPH and Farzin Khosrow-Khavar, PhD.
Dr. Suarez is a pharmacoepidemiologist and an Instructor of Epidemiology with the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at Rutgers School of Public Health. She is focused on studying the use and safety of medications in pregnancy. Dr. Suarez 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 then continued to 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 has 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 and medications for opioid use disorder in pregnancy.
Dr. Khosrow-Khavar is an Instructor of Epidemiology with the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at Rutgers School of Public Health and an affiliate member of Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey. He received his Ph.D. in Epidemiology from McGill University and completed his postdoctoral training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital which was supported by a postdoctoral training award from Fonds de Recherche du Québec Santé. He has conducted numerous pharmacoepidemiologic studies examining safety of drugs used in treatment of breast and prostate cancer. His work has been published in Circulation, Journal of Clinical Oncology, Annals of Oncology, Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, and American Journal of Epidemiology.
Dr. Khosrow-Khavar’s research is focused on generating robust evidence regarding the effectiveness and safety of novel drugs used to treat common malignancies in setting of routine clinical care. He is also interested in examining disparities in access and adherence to cancer treatments, and assessing patterns of health services utilization among patients diagnosed with common malignancies.