Yongmei Huang, MD, DrPH

Dr.Huang’s work focuses on health services and outcomes research in women’s health, gynecologic oncology, and surgery, specifically studying how healthcare access and processes impact patient well-being and making inferences about health outcomes at the population level. Recently, her research has expanded to include substance use disorder, with a particular focus on the appropriate medical use of opioids for perioperative pain management and medications for opioid use disorder among surgical patients, pregnant individuals, and cancer patients. Dr.Huang aims to apply advanced epidemiological study designs, sophisticated statistical methods, and artificial intelligence techniques in real-world observational studies to promote patient-centered healthcare and translate healthcare improvements from individuals to a broader population.

At the Mailman School of Public Health, Dr.Huang teaches “SAS Insights for CEOR” (HPM P8201) during the fall semester and “Applied Methods in Health Services and Outcomes Research” (HPM P8586) in the spring semester as part of the Comparative Effectiveness and Outcomes Research (CEOR) certificate program.

In her home department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, Dr.Huang collaborates with distinguished researchers, PIs, mentors, and mentees. She has extensive expertise in managing and analyzing large-scale nationwide datasets to study treatment patterns and conduct comparative effectiveness outcome research. These datasets include nationwide complex sampling datasets (e.g., HCUP data), population-level surveillance datasets (e.g., SEER and SEER/Medicare), national hospital registry datasets (e.g., NCDB), administrative claims datasets (e.g., MarketScan, Premier, Medicare, SPARCS), and electronic health records, among many others (e.g., NSQIP, Natality).

Previously, Dr. Huang was a Fred H. Bixby research fellow at the Population Council’s Center for BioMedical Research. She contributed to the development of Annovera® contraceptive vaginal ring and introduced the progesterone vaginal ring for lactating women in India. Her research on the safety of vaginal rings has advanced the field of contraceptive and microbicide delivery through vaginal rings for multipurpose prevention technologies aimed at protecting against STIs and unintended pregnancy. Her work also justified the pharmacodynamic effects of vaginal rings delivering the progesterone receptor modulator ulipristal acetate.

Dr. Huang holds a DrPH in Epidemiology, with a concentration in Clinical Epidemiology, from Columbia University, an MPH in Quantitative Methods from Harvard University, and an MD from Shanghai Jiaotong University. She also earned her Master and Bachelor of Medicine from Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology.