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CIK Staff
Seyed M. Karimi, PhD, is the Director of CIK and an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Management and Systems Sciences. He also holds the health economist position at the Center for Health Equity (CHE) at the Louisville Metro Department of Public Health and Wellness (LMPHW). Dr. Karimi is an applied health economist with expertise in health data analytics, health services research, and health policy evaluation. He has a strong track record of peer-reviewed research publications, success in securing external research funding, and experience in graduate-level teaching, advising, and mentoring. His most recent research was on modeling COVID-19 transmission and providing local hospitalization projections, investigating the effects of the expansion of Medicaid managed care in Kentucky, and the health and economic effects of exposure to air pollution.
Melissa Eggen, MPH, is a Senior Policy Analyst for the Commonwealth Institute of Kentucky. She is also a Ph.D. student in the Department of Health Management and Systems Sciences. Her research focuses on understanding and improving childbirth experiences, outcomes during pregnancy and postpartum, and reproductive health. She is a board member of The Milk Bank, an organization whose mission is to provide human donor milk to vulnerable infants, and a member of the Kentucky Perinatal Quality Collaborative and Kentucky Maternal Mortality Task Force. She is currently co-PI on a study to assess reproductive equity in Kentucky post-Dobbs, funded by the Society of Family Planning. Before joining UofL in 2019, Melissa worked as a Program Officer at state and regional philanthropic foundations in Missouri and Virginia, where she developed and led several initiatives, including a state-wide initiative to expand access to contraception and regionally focused collective impact efforts to eliminate infant mortality. She received her BA in Anthropology and Japanese language from the University of Kentucky and her MPH in Maternal and Child Health from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Md Yasin Ali Parh, MS, is a Data Analyst for the Commonwealth Institute of Kentucky. He is also a Ph.D. student in the Department of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics, where he is also employed as a graduate research assistant (GRA). His research focuses are probability theory, Bayesian inference, Markov chain Monte Carlo, subgroup identification for personalized medicine, survival analysis, and data mining. Before starting his Ph.D. at UofL, he was a GRA at the University of Nevada, Reno, and at Ball State University (BSU), where he completed his MS in Statistics. Yasin previously served as an instructor of statistics courses at a public university in Bangladesh. From 2021 onwards, he has served as an associate editor in the International Journal of Material and Mathematical Science. He has authored a number of peer-reviewed articles and has been awarded the UofL fellowship, the Mir Massoom Ali scholarship at the BSU, and the undergraduate scholarship at the University of Dhaka.
