O'Meara (left) with colleagues.
Published October 5, 2010, last updated on October 25, 2013 under Education News
This month, DGHI welcomes two new faculty to Duke this month, who will have primary appointments at the Duke School of Medicine.
Wendy O’Meara has joined Duke as an assistant professor in the School of Medicine. O’Meara brings six years of global health research to DGHI, as well as training in infectious disease epidemiology, molecular biology, and biomedical engineering. She previously was assistant professor at George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services, visiting lecturer at Moi University School of Public Health and co-field director of research for public health and primary care at AMPATH in Eldoret, Kenya.
O’Meara is based in Eldoret, Kenya, a Duke global health site, where she will teach in Moi University’s Master of Public Health program. She will also mentor Duke MSc-GH, doctoral and medical students, and Duke global health residents and infectious diseases fellows who conduct research in Eldoret or at Duke’s other global health sites in East Africa.
O’Meara has worked on a variety of international public health research projects and has nearly two dozen publications, with topics including the translation of research data into tools for evidence-based public health planning, the identification and quantification of the sources of error in malaria diagnosis, and the effectiveness of intermittent presumptive therapy (IPT) for malaria in infancy and pregnancy. She has served on the WHO’s Working Group on Measures of Malaria Vaccine Efficacy and has taught a course on a new technique for measuring parasite density at the Malaria Diagnostics Centre of Excellence in Kisumu, Kenya.
Daniel Westreich joins Duke and DGHI as assistant professor in OB/GYN. He came to Duke this fall from UNC-Chapel Hill where he completed a doctoral degree and postdoctoral fellowship in epidemiology, with a focus in global health and infectious diseases.
At Duke, Westreich will conduct epidemiology research, as well as teach a course this spring in DGHI’s Master of Science in Global Health program. The course, “Global Health Research: Epidemiologic Methods II,” will include a review of study designs and present advanced topics in epidemiology. Discussions will include causal inference, and how to read, review and write scientific literature. The course will have a weekly data analysis lab, in which students will develop programming and statistical analysis skills.
Westreich has published more than a dozen research papers, with topics ranging from the optimization of screening for acute HIV infection, the counseling and testing of TB patients for HIV in Congo, to the ethical, medical and public health tradeoffs of male circumcision and HIV prevention. He currently serves as a consultant for Family Health International on the surveillance of acute HIV infection and mathematical modeling of intervention for HIV prevention. Westreich has also taught courses in clinical epidemiology and tools for diagnosis and therapy fundaments at UNC-Chapel Hill.
