Current Projects
Learn more about current projects supported by the Center for Data Science and Consulting.
Cook County Survey
The Cook County Community Survey is a collaborative effort that brings together faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students to shed new light on the attitudes and behaviors of residents of Cook County.
Nursing and Patient Care
Healthcare is transforming rapidly, moving from an emphasis on disease management to that of health promotion and prevention. Chronic illness, multiple comorbidities, complex psychosocial needs and inequitable provision of care, along with shifting volumes of populations receiving care more predominantly outside the hospital has placed a mandate on the role of all professions to participate in this transformation. The United States healthcare system underperforms compared to other industrialized countries where cost and quality are concerned. Primary care is emerging as the necessary center of the health care delivery model.
Nurse understanding of how to assure quality and value for the public is paramount. Ownership of the value equation is a mandate that engages nurses in the examination of clinical practice and performance outcome. Definition of measures that highlight the contribution of nursing to health promotion, population health, access and equity will advance the transformation of healthcare for patients and populations alike. Leveraging the role of the ambulatory nurse as healthcare transforms at a dynamic pace may increase value for patients across the continuum. Nursing practice in this setting has not traditionally had support for structures or processes that promote top of scope practice. While outcomes have been collected for physicians in this setting, meaningful nursing outcome indicators are in their infancy. Efforts to advance the ambulatory nurse to top of license practice have centered on creation of standards, scope, curriculum, but data that correlates nurse and team role to improved performance related to high value measures will support improved contribution from nursing in primary care as well as, hypothetically, improved health, access and care.
The purpose of this study is to collect a variety of variables in the ambulatory environment and observe whether any meaningful associations exist between them. Variables that are independent and dependent within the structure, process and outcome domains will be studied for associations within the context of many covariates and environmental factors. The primary question of this study is: Do relationships exist between ambulatory nursing quality indicators that are structure related, process related, and outcome related?
- Specific Aim 1: Describe structure, process and outcome related quality indicators collected
- Specific Aim 2: Examine associations between structure, process and outcome related quality indicators. Implement multivariable adjustment, considering contextual factors such as age, race, gender, organization type, service region covered, payor mix
- Specific Aim 3: Identify the most salient structure and process variables related to patient outcomes.
Evolutionary Biology: Sexual Dimorphism is Stickleback Fish
Sex differences in shape and size are common across animal species. One explanation for such sexual dimorphism is that selection favors males and females that use different resources, reducing competition. Divergent resource use then drives divergence in the traits important for handling those resources, resulting in the evolution of sex differences in size and shape. In this project, we test the idea that release from predators might allow males and females to explore more niche space, diverge in resource use, and evolve sexual dimorphism. We are studying a 10 million year old lineage of fossilized stickleback fish fossils. Unfortunately, sex organs do not fossilize so we don't know which specimens are male or female. We are training statistical models to use trait data to predict sex in the living fish, and then applying those models to the fossil trait data to assign fossil sex. This is the critical first step in describing how sexual dimorphism evolves through time.
Chicago Air Quality and Its Effect on Public Health
An ongoing collaboration with faculty and students in Loyola University Chicago's School of Environmental Sustainability, this project is analyzing PurpleAir data in the Chicago area. This project is part of an NSF-funded, multi-institutional project CARE.
Preventing Urinary Tract Infections
While prior studies have found that several Lactobacillus species inhibit the growth of uropathogenic Escherichia coli (UPEC) and protect against UTI development, the mechanisms in which this occurs have yet to be thoroughly investigated. With the development of new statistical models, we were able to determine that Lactobacillus-mediated metabolites can cause latent phage induction in urinary E. coli isolates, which results in lysis (death) of the host E. coli cell. This NIH-funded project integrates bioinformatic, statistic, and microbiologic techniques to explicitly explore the extent and mechanisms of Lactobacillus-mediated induction of latent phages on UPEC colonization.