Welcome new SPH team members!

Please join the Department of Biostatistics, Department of Health Policy, Management and Leadership and the Office of Student Services in welcoming new members to their teams this month.

Dr. Casey Jelsema has joined the Department of Biostatistics as an assistant professor. He received a PhD in Statistics from Western Michigan University in 2013 and spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) before joining the faculty of West Virginia University in 2015. Dr. Jelsema enjoys both teaching and research in statistics. His research work has three main components. His dissertation and some subsequent work focused on spatial statistics, which is the application of statistical methodology in situations when the nearness of data points to each other imparts a dependence or correlation. While at NIEHS, he began working with order-restricted inference, which for Dr. Jelsema typically involves testing for some pattern among a set of ordered treatment groups. His R package (CLME) implements one such model. In addition to spatial and constrained inference, Dr. Jelsema works in collaboration with researchers from other fields, advising on appropriate analysis techniques and assisting in development of new models or methods.

Dr. Darren Gemoets is serving this year as visiting assistant professor in the Department of Biostatistics. He is currently applying his Bayesian and computational statistics background to projects in bioinformatics. Dr. Gemoets has previously published work in areas of computational statistics and environmental sciences and has years of statistical consulting experience.

Dr. Steve Davis joined the Department of Health Policy, Management, and Leadership in late May as an associate professor. He received his PhD in Social and Behavioral Sciences from West Virginia University in 2018. His dissertation focused on needle exchange programs for the prevention of hepatitis C virus in rural, Appalachian people who inject drugs. Dr. Davis has a particular interest in the role of paraphernalia laws and policing behaviors on the efficacy of syringe access programs, as well as public opinions of the harm reduction model. He is a past Chair and current Vice-Chair of the West Virginia University Institutional Review Board, and he regularly lectures on the ethical conduct of research. Prior to completing his doctorate, he spent 18 years as an adjunct faculty member in the WVU Department of Emergency Medicine conducting emergency department research with specialization in stroke awareness and analyses of large-scale datasets. Dr. Davis also taught financial statements as a member of the Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine (ELAM) finance faculty from 2000-2006.

Scott Mahaney, M. Ed. joined the School of Public Health in a Permanent, full-time capacity as the Developmental Advising Specialist. Mr. Mahaney is a 1991 graduate of WVU and earned his master’s degree from the University of Oklahoma in Adult and Higher Education Administration. He has been an academic advisor at WVU, Ohio State University and the University of Oklahoma.