.png)
PhD Graduate Student
Penn State College of Medicine
Callie Howells has recently completed her second year as a PhD student in Epidemiology at the Penn State College of Medicine. Prior to joining the program, she worked in the Pennsylvania Department of Health's Bureau of Epidemiology for 4 years where she played a key role in starting and maintaining the state's first birth defects surveillance system, and subsequently, the state's first neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS) surveillance system. She worked with state and CDC partners on 2 novel NAS research projects involving a survey to NAS-reporting facilities and a medical records abstraction project for a surveillance system quality assessment. Her work provided her with the opportunity to present in numerous local and national forums regarding her both her analyzed data and her experiences with successful surveillance program implementations. Callie continues to contribute expertise to resulting mansucripts and national discussion while shifting focus to food allergy and nutrition for current and future research.