With the fall semester in full swing and students back to school both in person and online, the USF College of Public Health (COPH) has some exciting new changes and roles among its faculty.

Penniecook leads USF DEI efforts

This August, Dr. Tricia Penniecook, associate professor of public health practice and vice dean for education and faculty affairs in the COPH, agreed to join USF President Rhea J. Law’s cabinet as interim vice president for diversity, equity and inclusion. 

The USF Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (ODEI) strives to provide vision, leadership and guidance to the USF community. The ODEI is committed to supporting the university’s mission of inclusive excellence in teaching, research, service and community engagement by fostering an inclusive culture for the OneUSF campus community. The ODEI seeks to play an important role in supporting and implementing the USF Strategic Plan.

Penniecook has more than 24 years of experience as a physician, educator and public health administrator.

As vice dean, she led the COPH through an academic master planning process, integrating a comprehensive strategy to address diversity, equity, inclusion and systemic racism in all policies and procedures of the college.

Before joining USF in 2017, Penniecook served as the first Afro-Latina dean of the School of Public Health at Loma Linda University and as vice president of academic administration at Oakwood University, a historically black university in Huntsville, Ala.

In her interim role, Penniecook will lead the ODEI as well as support leadership in fostering an inclusive and anti-racist campus community across the university’s three campuses.

“Congrats to Dr. Tricia Penniecook on being appointed interim vice president for diversity, equity and inclusion for the university by President Law!” said COPH Dean Donna Petersen. “I am pleased and proud that the president recognized Tricia’s incredible skill, experience and passion for this work. Bringing a public health, community and global perspective to this position, we are confident that Dr. Penniecook will help shape the culture of this office while the search continues for the permanent vice president.”

COPH welcomes new faculty

Students aren’t the only new faces around the COPH this semester! The COPH also welcomed four new faculty members to the community.

Catherine Bulka, PhD, assistant professor

Dr. Catherine Bulka joined the COPH community as an assistant professor specializing in environmental, molecular and maternal and child health epidemiology.

She completed her BA in biology and MPH in global epidemiology at Emory University before obtaining a PhD in epidemiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Most recently, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she studied early life exposures to environmental chemicals, DNA methylation and immune-mediated diseases.

Bulka is eager to meet new colleagues and students and build collaborations to discover how the environment causes disease and identify solutions.

Gillian Stresman, PhD, assistant professor

Dr. Gillian Stresman is an assistant professor of epidemiology.

Stresman has been working at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine for the past 10 years. She has been working on malaria epidemiology research for more than 15 years and has spent time in multiple malaria-endemic countries, including Zambia, Kenya, Gambia, Philippines and Haiti.

Her research focus is on understanding the epidemiological and spatial determinants of malaria transmission with the ultimate goal of accelerating transmission reduction and achieving elimination.

This research includes studies on understanding bias in routine surveillance due to asymptomatic infections, identifying residual parasite populations to target interventions, understanding the role of spatial transmission dynamics at various spatial-scales and identifying tools and metrics for malaria surveillance that are operationally feasible for implementation in endemic settings.

Additional research focuses on malaria elimination in terms of both how to achieve zero infections as well as how to measure the absence of infections.

Matthew Valente, PhD, assistant professor

Dr. Matthew Valente joined the COPH, along with his wife Dr. Judith Rijnhart, as an assistant professor of biostatistics and epidemiology.

Valente received his PhD from Arizona State University in 2018.

He has two main areas of research. The first involves bridging the gap between cutting-edge causal mediation methods and currently accepted statistical mediation methods in social science research. The second is developing and evaluating causal mediation analysis methods in the context of longitudinal data.

In addition to his primary research, Valente has assisted with data analytic issues on several federally funded projects evaluating effects of health intervention programs.

Judith Rijnhart, PhD, assistant professor

Dr. Judith Rijnhart joined the COPH as an assistant professor of epidemiology.

Rijnhart received her PhD from the Vrije University in Amsterdam in 2021 and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Amsterdam University Medical Center between 2020 and 2022.

Her research focuses on the evaluation and application of methods for mediation analysis.

Focusing on methodological research, she is working to bridge the gap between currently accepted methods for mediation analysis and cutting-edge methods for causal mediation analysis. Her substantive interests include the application of mediation analysis to study health disparities and dementia.

Story by Caitlin Keough, USF College of Public Health