Doctoral Students' Research Published

Several doctoral students in SPHHP’s Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health have had work accepted and published recently.

Lindsey Mattick recently had a paper accepted by the journal Cancer Causes and Control based on work she conducted in Tanzania. The paper, “Downstaging of Cervical Cancer in Tanzania over a 16-year period,” noted a certain rate of clinical downstaging (screening for cancer using clinical approaches to detect the disease earlier) occurred among women screened for cervical cancer at Ocean Road Cancer Institute in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, over 16-years. Mattick suggests a lower rate of clinical downstaging in unscreened women may be attributed to the screening program since the same decrease in the stage was not observed among unscreened women during the same period.
     Mattick’s research interest is cancer epidemiology in special populations. She is working to direct her future research to the future of cancer epidemiology disparities research.

Jennifer Mongiovi was the first author on a paper accepted by The Journal of Nutrition. The paper, “Glycemic Index, Glycemic Load and Risk of Ovarian Cancer in the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian (PLCO) Cohort,” discusses how glycemic index (GI—the potential of foods with the same amount of carbohydrates to raise blood glucose) and glycemic load (GL—a measure of how a carbohydrate affects blood glucose levels) measure the glucose response to diet, especially with carbohydrate consumption. Mongiovi studied whether GI and GL were associated with ovarian cancer risk. She did not find evidence that they were associated with an increased risk of ovarian cancer.
     Mongiovi is also a founder of 500 Women Scientists Buffalo, a group that improves the community through science.

Sarah Quinones was lead author on a brief for UNICEF, “Child Marriage and Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program: Analysis of Protective Pathways in the Amhara Region–Summary of Report Findings.” The brief found that the standard age for girls to marry is between 13 and 17 years-of-age, with many negative impacts of child marriage and early pregnancy on girls’ health and psychosocial outcomes. The majority of the women interviewed stated a preference for going to school over marrying young, though they and their parents have a minimal agency to express their choices. Quinones’s research interests focus on identifying and exploring the associations between social and environmental determinants of health and disparate health outcomes among and between populations to inform more proactive policy in the face of climate change and associated alterations in disease dynamics on a global scale.