Meet the Fellows

Yerby Fellow, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences
aali@hsph.harvard.edu
Mentor(s): Rita Hamad

Yerby Fellow: 2024 – 

Research Interests:  Dr. Abdinasir Ali received a PhD in health services and policy, with a concentration in health economics, from the University of Iowa. Ali’s main research focuses on examining the impact of housing, social and economic support policies on health, and health status of adults and children. Ali uses quasi-experimental designs and econometric methods to examine the health outcomes of low-income populations, particularly renting households. Ali’s most recent work focused on the impact of social and economic support policies including the housing eviction moratoriums, the temporary rental assistance program, the child tax credit, the earned income tax credit, and other support measures implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic on health status of low-income households. As Yerby fellow, Ali is working on investigating the impacts of income support policies on children’s health and development.

Yerby Fellow, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences
mcroston@hsph.harvard.edu
Mentor(s): Kasisomayajula (Vish) Viswanath

Yerby Fellow: 2025 –

Research Interests: Dr. Merriah Croston received a PhD in Public Health Sciences from Washington University in St. Louis. Previously, Croston held scientific positions at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Georgia Department of Public Health. Croston is passionate about addressing health communication inequalities through research and practice that aims to understand and meet the health information needs of hardly reached communities. Croston’s research primarily focuses on the health information ecosystem of Black digital communities. Her dissertation research, titled “Old Frames on New Media: Health Misinformation in Black Digital Communities,” employed traditional statistics and social network analysis to characterize the supply of COVID-19 misinformation on Black Twitter during the pandemic. As a Yerby Fellow, Croston will expand on this work by pursuing a set of multi-platform, mixed methods studies that further characterize how and why health (mis)information spreads to and within Black communities on social media.

Yerby Fellow, Department of Epidemiology
dreed@hsph.harvard.edu
Mentor(s): Jeffrey Imai-Eaton

Yerby Fellow: 2024 – 

Research Interests:  Dr. Domonique Reed received a PhD in epidemiology from Columbia University. Reed’s research primarily focuses on understanding the impact of interpersonal relationships on risk behaviors and engagement in HIV prevention services for adolescent girls and young women. Reed’s dissertation research, titled “Moving Beyond the Individual: A Data-driven Approach to Assessing the Multi-level Determinants of HIV among Adolescent Girls and Young Women in Sub-Saharan Africa” was a multi-pronged study that applies novel data science methods to better understand the multi-level drivers of HIV risk in this vulnerable population. As a Yerby Fellow, Reed will expand on work in data integration to characterize gaps in sub-Saharan African populations that are missing from HIV programming that go beyond standard demographic stratification, such as age and sex. In Reed’s free time, she enjoys long distance running, traveling, and spending time with family.

Yerby Fellow, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences
cwiley@hsph.harvard.edu
Mentor(s): Laura Kubzansky and Eric Rimm

Yerby Fellow: 2024 – 

Research Interests:  Dr. Cameron Wiley received a PhD in psychological science, with a concentration in health psychology, from the University of California, Irvine. With an academic background that encompasses multiple fields (e.g., psychology, biomedicine, epidemiology), Wiley’s work examines: 1) how the regulation of emotion and stress influences cardiovascular functioning and health, 2) the physiological mechanisms (e.g., autonomic, immune) that facilitate this connection, 3) how these psychophysiological interactions differ across racial/ethnic groups to contribute to disparities in cardiovascular disease risk, and 4) the roles of emotional and social well-being factors in mitigating (or perpetuating) those disparities. As a Yerby fellow, Wiley aims to explore if and how behavioral and environmental factors differentially predict cardiovascular morbidity and mortality outcomes based on racial/ethnic background. Wiley also plans to begin developing a psychometric tool to better assess positive psychological functioning in African Americans.

Yerby Fellow, Department of Environmental Health
hzewdie@hsph.harvard.edu
Mentor(s): Francine Laden and Jaime Hart

Yerby Fellow: 2025 – 

Research Interests: Dr. Hiwot Zewdie received a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Washington School of Public Health. Zewdie’s research is focused on the health and health equity implications of neighborhood built environments in settings including the U.S., Colombia, and Ethiopia. Zewdie’s career goal is to advance place-based epidemiologic research to improve understanding of contextual determinants of noncommunicable diseases and related disparities, particularly in the Global South where such research remains limited. As a Yerby Fellow she will focus on (1) integrating mixture-modeling methods into place-based epidemiology to improve exposure assessment and disease risk characterization of neighborhood environments, and (2) strengthening place-based research capacity in the Global South.