Staff

Jaime Benavides, PhD

Associate Research Scientist
jap2312@cumc.columbia.edu

Jaime completed his PhD in environmental engineering at Polytechnic University of Catalonia in the department of Earth Sciences at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. His doctoral research focused on the development and application of a street-level air quality model for Barcelona, Spain. His primary research interests are in understanding the link between environmental exposures and human health in urban settings. At Columbia, he is applying novel methods to find patterns in urban environmental exposure mixtures aiming to investigate the impact of these patterns on adverse health outcomes. He is also involved in improving air pollution exposure assessment for large-scale population-wide epidemiologic studies.

Marta Galanti, PhD

Associate Research Scientist
mg3822@cumc.columbia.edu

Marta Galanti completed her PhD research in Complex Systems and Mathematical Physics in a shared program between University of Florence (Italy) and University of Orléans (France). Her previous research focused on the analysis of diffusion-reaction processes in biological and industrial media in non-ideal conditions (complex geometries and crowded environments). At Columbia, she is working on developing mathematical models to generate predictions and advance the understanding and forecast of infections.  One of the goal of her research will be to study respiratory virus transmission with the aim of incorporating antigenic information of rapidly evolving viruses into real-time forecasts of influenza.

Roselyn Kaondera-Shava, PhD

Postdoctoral Research Scientist 
rfk2124@cumc.columbia.edu

Roselyn Kaondera-Shava received her PhD in Mathematics from Botswana International University of Science & Technology. Her area of expertise is applied mathematics, with specific focus on Mathematical Epidemiology. Her doctorate was dedicated to the development and analysis of mathematical models for infectious diseases (such as Ebola virus disease and AIDS-associated Kaposi’s sarcoma) caused by viral infections, with a particular interest in gaining more insight into disease dynamics and outbreaks, leading to the control of disease spread. At Columbia University, Roselyn is working on investigating nonlinear error growth in infectious disease systems and developing model-inference frameworks for simulation of infectious agents, inference of critical epidemiological characteristics, counterfactual simulations, and projections and forecasting.

Matteo Perini, PhD

Postdoctoral Research Scientist
mp4167@cumc.columbia.edu

Matteo earned his PhD from the Department of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences at University of Milan (Italy) and his MS in Biosciences from University of Camerino (Italy). His doctoral studies mainly focused on the development of bioinformatic tools and protocols for the application of new approaches for fast and inexpensive subspecies typing of pathogens, particularly in nosocomial settings. At Columbia, Matteo is working on metapopulation mathematical models with data assimilation methods to study and forecast the dynamics of infectious diseases. He is also working on human genomic data to perform Genome-Wide Association Studies in acute respiratory infections.

Tal Robin

Postdoctoral Research Scientist
ttr2113@cumc.columbia.edu

Tal received his PhD from the Department of Physical Chemistry at Tel-Aviv University for his work on stochastic approaches to the analysis of kinetic schemes. His previous work included models of enzymatic reactions, adhesion, and pollination with emphasis on intuitive modeling. His main interests are stochastic processes, agent-based modeling, and statistical inference. At Columbia, Tal is working on a network-based model of antimicrobial-resistant pathogens spreading within hospitals in an effort to extract accurate estimations of model parameters and identifying individuals with increased risk. This work's aim is to advance knowledge about specific infections as well as the methods themselves.

Teresa Yamana, PhD

Associate Research Scientist
tky2104@cumc.columbia.edu

Teresa completed her PhD in hydrology at MIT in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.  Her research interests lie at the intersection of environment and infectious disease, with a focus on vector-borne disease.  Her doctoral research explored the relationships between climate, entomology, and malaria transmission in West Africa using a framework of detailed mechanistic modeling.  This framework was used to assess the impacts of climate change on malaria transmission.  At Columbia, she is developing transmission models for dengue and other vector-borne diseases to be used in conjunction with data assimilation methods to generate ensemble-based forecasts of disease outbreaks.