College of Health Solutions welcomes 6 new faculty

The College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University is welcoming six dynamic new faculty members for the 2023–24 academic year.

The new professors’ expertise spans a wide variety of areas that will support the college’s efforts to produce future health care leaders and advance its mission to improve health outcomes for individuals and communities.

The college has a unique structure that blends several diverse yet related health disciplines to help the community meet its many health challenges.

“The College of Health Solutions is welcoming an incredible cohort of faculty this year, bringing expertise across health domains, including health services research, genomic epidemiology, adaptive research design, multilingual speech disorders, biostatistics and metabolomics,” Vice Dean Michael Yudell said. “We are so excited to support them and see them thrive, building new research collaborations and developing new courses to enrich our community and benefit the public’s health.”

Four members of the group are teaching during the fall semester with the remaining two joining the team in January.

Meet the new College of Health Solutions faculty members: 

Stephanie Carpenter is an assistant professor in adaptive design research methodology. Until recently, Carpenter was the associate director of the Data Science for the Dynamic Intervention Decision-Making (d3) Center and a researcher/fellow in the Quantitative Methodology Program at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research Survey Research Center. She conducts research examining the role of emotion and cognition in decision behavior, with interest in investigating ways to promote health equity through leveraging adaptive designs to increase engagement in health behavior change interventions.

Zhongxue Chen, a professor of biostatistics, is currently at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Florida International University. He will join the college’s faculty in January 2024 and assume the program director role for the Master of Science in biostatistics in fall 2024. Biostatistical methodological research includes developing advanced statistical methods for large-scale biological and biomedical data. Along with collaborators, Chen has developed novel and powerful statistical approaches for analyzing large-scale high-throughput genetic data, including genome-wide association study data, genome-wide methylation data, microarray data and next-generation sequencing data.

Haiwei Gu, an associate professor in metabolomics, returns to ASU after a brief stint at Florida International University. Previously he was an assistant professor at ASU from 2017–21. His research interests focus on biomarker discovery and systems biology studies using multi-omics approaches, including metabolomics, lipidomics, transcriptomics and microbiomics. He works closely with students and trainees and partners with many biological and clinical researchers in various studies for identifying metabolic markers and investigating metabolic mechanisms.

Tiffany Lemon is an assistant professor in health services research. Prior to joining ASU’s faculty, Lemon was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Global Health at Massachusetts General Hospital. Her research interests include identifying and quantifying the impacts of social policy, specifically insurance policy, that influence HIV disease progression and manufacture health inequities among marginalized populations. She is interested in applying advanced quantitative methods that leverage high-quality longitudinal data to identify viable points of intervention and developing strategies to mitigate adverse outcomes for individual and community health.

My Phan is an assistant professor of genomic epidemiology and bioinformatics of pathogens. Most recently, Phan was an assistant professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, MRC Uganda Research Unit in Entebbe, Uganda. Her expertise includes global health, infectious diseases, viral pathogen genomics and evolution. Her experience in virus genomics epidemiology and evolution include the real-time sequencing of the Ebola virus in Sierra Leone and the SARS-CoV-2 virus in Uganda, South Sudan and Burundi, work that has informed public health measures for contact tracing and quarantine.

Neelima Wagley is an assistant professor in multilingual/multicultural speech and hearing science. Wagley will start her faculty position at the College of Health Solutions in January 2024 after a stint as a postdoctoral research scholar at Vanderbilt University. Her program of research is centered on building inclusive models of language and reading by examining children’s crosslinguistic experiences and its influences on brain development. She approaches her work by asking questions theoretically grounded in developmental, clinical and educational science, using behavioral and neuroimaging approaches (e.g., fMRI, fNIRS, MEG).