Biography

Prof. Sánchez is interested in the development and innovative application of statistical methodology to the study of environmental determinants of health, and health disparities. Her methodological research is in the area of latent variable models, correlated data, and study design, all of which is motivated by environmental studies, broadly defined. Sánchez is internationally recognized for her work on latent variable models with environmental health applications. In addition to her work in environmental health, she has extensive expertise in research involving health disparities and cardiovascular disease, including stroke, as well as the effectiveness of policies geared toward elimination of childhood obesity. She has published numerous peer reviewed articles in leading statistical, epidemiology, and medical journals including JASA, Biometrics and the Journal of Applied Statistics, Statistics in Medicine, Epidemiology, American Journal of Epidemiology, Environmental Health Perspective, JAMA Pediatrics and Health Affairs. She currently leads methodological research to assess health impacts of neighborhood-level exposures (social and built environment) and their interactions with individual-level factors/exposures through her NIH-funded project “Characterizing health impacts of built environment features using complex data” (R01 HL131610, PI: Sanchez). The goals of the project are to enable data-driven estimation of time and spatial scales at which environmental exposures shape health behaviors and downstream biological outcomes, and characterize the simultaneous impact of multiple, correlated environmental features on health, including social factors.