Weston Williams
20+ years of experience working with public health data
Team based approach working with various clients, including:
Governmental agencies such as CDC, HHS, DOD, and state health departments
Universities
Non-profit organizations
PhD in Epidemiology and MHS in International Health
Extensive experience with chronic and infectious diseases
Areas of Expertise
End-to-end data management services include:
Process development and documentation through SOPs, Wikis, and training tools to promote institutional knowledge
Standardizing complex data management procedures to promote documentation and extensive quality control
Development of programs in R, SAS, or R shiny tools to streamline procedures and minimize workload
Epidemiology is the application of statistical methods to systematically describe and improve health where people and data may not follow strict mathematical “rules”. It is crucial to account for this throughout study design, implementation, analysis, and interpretation. By understanding potential biases and other limitations, I seek to minimize issues and maximize the utility of analytic results. The scope of experience with many statistical methods and design adaptations allows me to fit the right design and analysis to your evaluation and research questions.
The ability to communicate results brings real meaning to our work. The most sophisticated study design and statistical analysis can only be useful if the results are effectively communicated to those who can take action. Throughout the process of developing a study design and analyzing the results, how the results will drive improvements in public health is in the forefront of my work.
Work Highlights
Data Driven Policy
I recently developed and conducted an analysis for a project that was published in JAIDS. We explored whether CDC-funded HIV testing was more focused in states with a high prevalence of undiagnosed HIV. The analysis helps to inform policy and identify areas that may need more funding or focus on HIV testing. The full manuscript can be accessed here.
Program Improvement
HIV Partner Services is an important program for notification and identification of people newly infected with HIV. But the process involves multiple steps and figuring out how to improve the program can be complicated. We used CDC data from 2019 to assess where CDC and jurisdictions should focus their efforts to best promote identifying persons living with HIV who have not yet been diagnosed. The full manuscript can be accessed here.
Dashboards for Data Sharing and Analysis
Working with an IT development company, we designed and implemented the WV Match survey dashboard for the state of West Virginia and West Virginia University. This cutting-edge tool allows users to query tabulations and run statistical models. My work focused on developing code in R to tabulate descriptive data and run logistic, multinomial, and ordinal models on complex weighted survey data, and feed the results to the site. I also worked on the codebook as a dataset, so that it could provide metadata to the web tool and analysis code. This publicly available tool is accessible here. The “Summarize Data” and “Analyze Associations” links allow for user-interactive data exploration and analysis.
Real World Evaluation
Working as a subcontractor for CDC, I provided design, analysis, and reporting support for multiple evidence-based interventions to prevent HIV. Our work demonstrated the value of these interventions in real-world implementation. Multiple publications were generated from this set of projects. This final manuscript summarizes the overall findings.
Thoughtful Data Collection
I have been working on multiple projects to support a team designing and implementing data collection tools to promote meaningful analyses and high-quality data. We are currently analyzing data for an evaluation of safe spaces for LGBTQ+ groups. We designed these online data collection tools using Epi Info, and I coded analyses in R leveraging APIs so we could monitor data quality in real time.