Christian Testa
I am a statistical data analyst at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health working with the Public Health Disparities Geocoding Project. I received my Bachelors of Science in Mathematics from Tufts University in 2017.
Research Interests
My research interests focus on mathematical modeling techniques and their public health applications.
Topics I have been particularly interested in recently include:
- Causal inference
- Bayesian methods
- Spatiotemporal statistics
- Infectious disease epidemiology
- Flexible, machine learning methods
My recent ongoing work has focused on applying these techniques to understand disparities in COVID-19 outcomes, how discrimination throughout the lifecourse is manifested through changes in epigenetic markers as it relates to epigenetic aging, and how experiences of multifactorial types of discrimination impact people’s health.
My previous work with the Prevention Policy Modeling Lab focused on using dynamic models of infectious diseases to estimate optimal intervention strategies.
Recent Blog Posts
Our Trip to Seattle
Seattle was so much fun! I don’t know how on Earth we did so much in just two days, but we did.
Scale (Zoom) Dependent Maps with Leaflet in R
Something I’ve wanted to accomplish for a while is producing interactive maps in R that provide a higher level of resolution as the user zooms in.
I’ve finally sat down and accomplished that, and I’m quite happy to be sharing the R code here.
Since I live in the Boston area and have family in the New York area, I thought those were great examples to start with, but the code should be easily adaptable to any US state or locale that has data collected in the American Community Survey.
The first offering of ID529 Data Management and Analytic Workflows in R at Harvard
Teaching ID529 was such a blast, and I’m so happy with how the course turned out. The students have repeatedly communicated that they learned an extraordinary amount, that the skills they learned will be tools and frameworks of thinking they take forward with them as they continue their research and scholarship, and that they appreciated the down-to-earth, fun, affirmative atmosphere we fostered in our classroom.
→ Click here to see more of my blog posts ←
Publications
I have been an author on a number of journal articles and preprints. If you’d like to read them, check out my publications or Google Scholar page.