Sharon Curhan, MD, ScM, Director and Co-Founder
Dr. Curhan received her MD from Harvard Medical School and her Master of Science in Epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health. Her research focuses on the identification of modifiable risk factors for hearing loss and tinnitus, with the goal of preventing these common conditions. She has led several of the studies of risk factors for hearing loss in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study and the Nurses’ Health Studies. She has worked with these cohorts based at the Channing Laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital for over ten years and has published numerous research articles, editorials, and textbook chapters on ear and hearing disorders based on these cohorts.
Gary Curhan, MD, ScD, Co-Founder
Dr. Curhan received his MD from Harvard Medical School and his ScD in Epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health. He completed his residency in Internal Medicine and his fellowship in Nephrology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, a member of the Renal Division at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a practicing nephrologist, and he is Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. His research focuses on the prevention of common diseases by investigating scientifically and clinically important questions and exploring the role of modifiable factors. He initiated the study of hearing loss in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study and the Nurses’ Health Studies and prevention of hearing loss is one of his research priorities. He has worked with these cohorts based at the Channing Laboratory for over twenty years and has expanded the group’s research activities into many new areas. He has extensive experience with the confirmation of self-reported conditions and also the collection of high quality data from individual participants. He organized the collection of thousands of blood samples and 24-hour urine samples from across the country. He has received funding from the NIH for over fifteen years, and has been the Principal Investigator for R01, P01, U01 T32 and K24 grants.
Roland (Ron) Eavey, MD, SM
Roland (Ron) D. Eavey, M.D., S.M. is the Director of the Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center for Otolaryngology and Communication Sciences in Nashville. He serves also as the Guy M. Maness Professor and Chair of the Department of Otolaryngology. Previously, Dr. Eavey was a Professor of Otology and Laryngology at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Pediatric Otolaryngology Service at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Boston. Besides being board certified in Otolaryngology, he is also board certified in Pediatrics. In addition, he has a master’s degree in health care management from Harvard School of Public Health. In his current role, Dr. Eavey serves nearly 500 individuals (students, residents, fellows, clinical and research faculty, and staff). The Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center annually has nearly 10 million dollars in research awards and approximately 50 grants and contracts. The Center has approximately 150,000 square feet of clinical, educational and research space devoted to Otolaryngology and Hearing and Speech Sciences. Further, there is clinical and research space (wet lab) on other parts of campus. Dr. Eavey’s research focuses on the pediatric ear. He has generated publications in areas such as epidemiology, molecular genetics and tissue engineering. He is currently a co-investigator on the U grant studying hearing loss in the Nurses' Health Studies, a PI on a submitted T32 grant, and an internal adviser on a 50 million dollar Vanderbilt CTSA competitive renewal. Dr. Eavey has published over 200 publications in peer-reviewed journals, including very high impact journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, the Journal of Clinical Investigation, and Nature Genetics.
Chris Halpin, PhD
Chris Halpin, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Otology and Laryngology, Harvard Medical School and Clinical Associate in the Department of Audiology, Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Boston. He received his doctorate in Audiology from the University of Virginia. His research and clinical interests focus on fitting hearing aid output to damaged cochleae. Current work is directed toward diagnosis of cochlear regions using speech intelligibility, tinnitus, genetic investigations and analysis of audiologic results in human temporal bone cases.
Molin Wang, PhD
Dr. Molin Wang is an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health. She has more than eight years experience in statistical collaboration on various projects with Harvard – Dana Farber Cancer Institute biomedical investigators and the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG), including the design and analysis of cancer clinical trials, studies in genetic susceptibility of diseases, experiments in basic research in the biology of diseases, and analysis and reporting of observational studies. She is now actively involved in several large projects that are collecting new data and performing validation studies in the Channing based cohorts, including the Nurses’ Health Studies I and II and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. She is a statistician for the Pooling Project on Diet and Cancer in Women and Men, for the Vitamin D and Breast Cancer/Colorectal Cancer Consortium, and for the Program Project. Dr. Wang has actively conducted methodological studies in several biostatistical areas including analysis methods for survival analysis and measurement error correction.
Oana Zeleznik, PhD
Dr. Zeleznik received her PhD in Bioinformatics from the Graz University of Technology (Austria) where she focused on the integrative analysis of multiple omic data types. She is an Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation scholar and her background includes a BSc in Computer Engineering and an MSc in Machine Learning. During her postdoctoral training in cancer epidemiology at the Channing Division of Network Medicine (Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA) she specialized in metabolomics analyses, including the identification of novel and potentially modifiable risk factors for chronic disease. She is leading several CHEARS investigations of tinnitus and hearing loss that focus on improving the understanding of their etiologies through the application of cutting edge bioinformatics and machine learning methods to the integration of multiple omics, particularly metabolomics and genomics, with epidemiological data such as health, diet and lifestyle information.