Faculty

Since its inception under Dr. Harry Guess, the Pharmacoepidemiology at UNC has attracted world-class faculty members and doctoral students. Our current core of seven faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and doctoral students have unparalleled expertise in pharmacoepidemiology and comparative effectiveness research, including advanced methods and meta-analysis of health-care data. Our students are selected for the combination of scientific, intellectual and management skills that will make them future leaders in health care.

Michele Jonsson Funk, PhD, FISPE, is Associate Professor of Epidemiology, Head of the pharmacoepidemiology program at UNC, and Director of the Center for Pharmacoepidemiology. Over the past 14 years on faculty at UNC, her research has focused on the intersection of pharmacoepidemiology and methods for estimating valid effects in real world data with specific applications in women’s health research. She has an independent research program with substantial external funding (including two R01s), published more than 80 papers in the peer-reviewed literature and developed strong collaborative relationships with clinical colleagues. Her ongoing research studies use data from Medicare, IBM Watson Health Analytics’ Marketscan data, and the Carolina Data Warehouse for Health (CDW-H) – an electronic medical record warehouse that brings together rich clinical and administrative data on over 2 million patients seen across the spectrum of care by providers in the UNC Health Care System. More recently, she has led efforts at UNC to link complementary data (e.g. Medicare claims with the UNC CDW-H). Her methodologic expertise includes rigorous estimation of drug effects using non-experimental data, evaluation of treatment effect heterogeneity, implementation of propensity scores, doubly robust estimators, causal inference methods, and data linkage approaches. Her applied research spans a number of substantive areas including cardiovascular disease, cancer, and women’s health including effects of prenatal drug exposures on pregnancy outcomes.

Juan M. Hincapie-Castillo, PharmD, MS, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to joining UNC, he was an assistant professor of Pharmaceutical Outcomes & Policy at the University of Florida. He is a graduate from the University of Florida College of Pharmacy where he received the degrees of Doctor of Pharmacy, Master of Science in Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Ph.D. with a concentration in pharmacoepidemiology. He is the recipient of the 2020 New Investigator Award from the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy and the 2020 Emerging Leader Award from the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology (ISPE). His research is at the intersection of legal and pharmacoepidemiology, where he leverages large real-world data sources to evaluate and promote evidence-based policymaking. His primary focus is on improving prescribing policies and the provision of equitable pain management and safe psychotropic medication use. Dr. Hincapie-Castillo is a consultant for the FDA’s Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee (DSaRM). In 2021, he was appointed as a Research Fellow for the Center for Public Health Law Research (CPHLR) at Temple University. He currently serves as President of the Board of Directors and member of the Science & Policy Advisory Board for the National Pain Advocacy Center.

Jennifer Lund, MSPH, PhD, FISPE is Associate Professor of Epidemiology and the Director of Data Strategy and Education with the UNC Lineberger’s Cancer Information and Population Health Resource (CIPHR). Dr. Lund conducts pharmacoepidemiologic and health services research with applications to older adult populations and those diagnosed with cancer. The overall objective of her work is to generate robust evidence on the uses, benefits, and harms of medical treatments that will improve decisions made by policymakers, providers, and patients and their families. Dr. Lund’s research program draws upon clinical trials, large healthcare databases, and advanced epidemiologic methods to evaluate: (1) the quality of care received, (2) the effectiveness and safety of treatment options, and (3) the role of polypharmacy, multimorbidity, and frailty in treatment selection, adherence, and outcomes. She serves on the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology (ISPE) Board of Directors and is an Associate Editor for Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety, as well as an Editorial Board member for Epidemiology and the Journal of Geriatric Oncology.

Evan Mayo-Wilson, MPA, DPhil is an Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology. His research focuses on (1) evaluating the benefits and harms of health interventions (pharmacological and behavioral); (2) improving methods for clinical trials and systematic reviews; and (3) developing methods and interventions to increase research transparency and openness. He the Scientific Director for peer review of PCORI Research Reports (contracted by Origin Editorial) and Associate Editor for Systematic Reviews for the American Journal of Public Health. He has co-authored multiple guidelines for reporting clinical trials and systematic reviews, including the TOP Guidelines, PRISMA 2020, CONSORT-SPI, CONSORT Harms, and JARS. He currently serves on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) committee “Review of Relevant Literature Regarding Adverse Events Associated with Vaccines”. He previously served on the American Psychological Association (APA) Advisory Steering Committee for Development of Clinical Practice Guidelines, and he co-authored three National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE, UK) guidelines for the identification and treatment of mental health problems. He also served as a member of the NIH Science of Behavior Change (SOBC) working group to improve NIH policies and procedures for reporting the methods and results of clinical trials of behavioral interventions, and as a member of the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) working group to develop standards for comparator selection in trials of behavioral and social interventions.

Charles Poole, MPH, ScD, is Associate Professor of Epidemiology.  In over 40 years as an epidemiologist, he has worked in government, contract research, consulting, and academia.  Spreading from his roots in environmental epidemiology, Dr. Poole has collaborated, published, taught and lectured widely on a broad range of methodologic issues in nearly every substantive area of epidemiologic research.  Topics of sustained interest include meta-analysis, applied interpretation of statistical measures in testing and estimation, case-control study design, and the value of absolutes over ratios and proportions in the estimation of public health effects.

Til Stürmer, MD, MPH, PhD, FISPE is Nancy A. Dreyer Distinguished Professor and Chair, Department of Epidemiology, UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. Dr. Stürmer has led the pharmacoepidemiology program and the CPE since joining UNC in 2008 and until becoming chair in 2018. As an internist and pharmacoepidemiologist, he has a dual focus in epidemiologic methods and clinical epidemiology. Dr. Stürmer’s early research in epidemiologic methods includes the development of more efficient matching strategies in genetic epidemiology and measurement error correction methods in case-control studies. Since 2003 he has focused on the value of propensity scores (PSs) for pharmacoepidemiologic studies in older adults (mainly: Medicare beneficiaries) based on his ongoing R01 from the National Institute on Aging (over 100 publications). Dr. Stürmer also developed a novel integration of ideas from measurement error correction and propensity score analysis to improve control for confounding by medication-use choices using data from validation studies. His research in clinical epidemiology covers many topics including nephro- and cardiovascular toxicity of paracetamol and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs; chemoprevention of colorectal cancer and dementia with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs; determinants of antibiotic resistance; and hormone therapy, pain and sub-clinical inflammation in osteoarthritis. His current focus is on antidiabetics in older patients with type 2 diabetes.

Mollie Wood, MPH, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology. Dr. Wood’s research focuses on the risks and benefits of medication use during pregnancy. She is particularly interested in medications used to treat chronic illness, psychiatric illness, and pain. Her research program currently includes projects focused on the role of pharmacogenomics in studies of prenatal exposure to psychotropic medications, treatment of chronic hypertension, migraine, and depression during pregnancy, and target trial emulation methodology. Much of her research is conducted using large administrative databases in the US and Scandinavia, as well as electronic health records in the UNC Health system.