Erika Waters, PhD, MPH, associate professor of surgery, seeks to understand how people think about health risk and how those thoughts influence their health-related decisions and behavior. To accomplish this, Dr. Waters’ explores the rich variety of cognitive, emotional and social factors that make it difficult for people to use health risk information effectively. Understanding these inter-relationships will enable the development of health communication and behavior interventions that aim to reduce disparities in cancer morbidity and mortality. Most of Dr. Waters’ research focuses on cancer prevention, but the principles derived from her work have broader applicability to other health conditions.
Dr. Waters also teaches courses in the Master of Population Health Sciences degree program.
Victoria J. Fraser, MD, is the Adolphus Busch Professor of Medicine and chairman of the Department of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Fraser’s research is based on the broad area of healthcare epidemiology, including the study of nosocomial infections, specifically surgical site infections, blood stream infections and ventilator-associated pneumonia. She studies risk factors, outcomes and costs of these infections as well as how to prevent them. Dr. Fraser uses hospital-based information systems and informatics to do electronic surveillance. She is studying the epidemiology of medical errors, adverse events and outcomes and has developed new reporting systems for medical errors and adverse events as well as studying the risk factors and outcomes of medical errors, adverse events and healthcare delivery in order to develop strategies to prevent these events and improve outcomes.
Dr. Fraser is also using large administrative databases and claims data to study the changing epidemiology of infectious and multi-drug resistant organisms. These data allow development of risk-prediction models, analysis of geographic variation, outcomes and costs.
Dr. Fraser also supervises a number of clinical research training programs to foster curriculum development in comparative effectiveness and health services research, outcomes measurement, methods and career development.
Graham A. Colditz, MD, DrPH, is the Niess-Gain Professor in the School of Medicine, chief of the Division of Public Health Sciences, associate director of Prevention and Control at Siteman Cancer Center, and deputy director of the Institute for Public Health at Washington University. With a longstanding interest in the causes and prevention of chronic disease, particularly among women, Dr. Colditz has evaluated numerous lifestyle factors including exogenous hormones and breast cancer risk and the development of statistical models to predict cancer risk for individuals. Other areas of expertise include tobacco and obesity in relation to cancer and other chronic disease.