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Associate Professor
University of Colorado School of Medicine/Children's Hospital Colorado
Disclosure(s): No financial relationships to disclose
Dr. Sonja Ziniel is the Senior Survey Methodologist of Children's Hospital Colorado and has an appointment as Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, Division of Pediatric Hospital Medicine, at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. She received her MA in Administrative Science with an emphasis in Evaluation Research from the University of Konstanz in Germany and her PhD in Survey Methodology from the University of Michigan. Before joining the University of Colorado in 2015, she worked as a Senior Survey Methodologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and had an appointment as Instructor at the Harvard School of Medicine.
Dr. Ziniel’s research focuses on methodological issues in survey design. She has developed and psychometrically validated several survey instruments, such as the Pediatric Integrated Care Survey, a widely used tool to measure parental views care integration. In addition, she has collaborated with and mentored clinicians and other healthcare researchers from a variety of disciplines on their research projects as a survey methodologist or applied statistician, resulting in over 80 publications. Dr. Ziniel is striving to provide high-quality survey data to decision-makers at all organizational levels and maximize their use.
When she is not working on surveys or data, she is passionate about saving helpless animals that are innocently blamed by her officemate, an infectious disease MD, to be responsible for a child’s disease. She also enjoys cuddling the ever-increasing number of chickens and other animals on her hobby farm in the Rocky Mountains – even against the CDC’s advice.