Jenine Harris earned her doctorate in public health studies and biostatistics from Saint Louis University School of Public Health in 2008 and currently teaches biostatistics courses in the Brown School public health program. Her recent research interests focus on increasing diversity in data science and improving the quality of research in public health by using reproducible research practices throughout the research process.
Harris’ award-winning 2020 book, “Statistics with R: Solving Problems Using Real-World Data,” is an introductory statistics textbook published by Sage. The book combines statistical concepts with R coding and includes representation of women throughout as both characters and as authors of resources. Each chapter addresses a different social problem using a real-world data set.
Harris is also an author on more than 90 peer-reviewed publications and developed and published the odds.n.ends R package available on the CRAN. In 2013, she authored “An Introduction to Exponential Random Graph Modeling,” which was published in the Sage Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences series, and was translated into Chinese, and is accompanied the ergmharris R package available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN).
Female authors are underrepresented as sole and first authors and as members of authorship teams in readings for undergraduate college courses, finds a new analysis from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.
Foodborne illness is a serious and preventable public health problem, affecting one in six Americans and costing an estimated $50 billion annually. As local health departments adopt new tools that monitor Twitter for tweets about food poisoning, a study from Washington University in St. Louis is the first to examine practitioner perceptions of this technology.
Nearly 1 in 4 U.S. citizens gets food poisoning every year, but very few report it. Monitoring Twitter for food-poisoning tweets and replying to them could improve foodborne illness reporting, according to a new study from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.
An analysis of Twitter hashtag use on the subject of diabetes provides new insights about spreading health information through social media. The study, led by Jenine Harris, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, looked at the hashtag #diabetes and its interaction with two Twitter measures of engagement, retweeting and favoriting. The study found retweeting and favoriting was significantly lower for tweets about the number or percentage of people with diabetes, while favoriting was higher for tweets about health problems associated with diabetes.
Social media marketing strategies present both
challenges and opportunities for public health professionals. While
misinformation can be spread, social media does provide an effective way
of reaching large audiences. Situational analysis by researchers
at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis of a recent
social media campaign by the Chicago Department of Public Health
suggests that public health organizations need to pay close attention to
how they disseminate information, and also to the response the campaign
gets.
An estimated 55 million to 105 million people in the United States suffer from foodborne illnesses each year, resulting in costs of $2-$4 billion annually. What if Twitter could be used to track those cases and more quickly identify the source of the problem? A new analysis by a researcher at Washington University in St. Louis Brown School shows that new technology might better allow health departments to engage with the public to improve foodborne illness surveillance.
A new study, led by Jenine K. Harris, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School, examined the use of the hashtag #childhoodobesity in tweets to track Twitter conversations about the issue of overweight kids.
The use of social media to disseminate information is increasing in local health departments, but a new study, led by Jenine K. Harris, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School finds that Twitter accounts are followed more by organizations than individuals and may not be reaching the intended audience.
Twitter is proving to be an effective tool for local health departments in disseminating health information — especially in promoting specific health behaviors. The latest study, led by Jenine K. Harris, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School, focused on diabetes, a disease that may affect an estimated one-third of U.S. adults by 2050. “We focused on diabetes first, both because of increasing diabetes rates,” Harris says, “and also because people living with diabetes tend to use online health-related resources at a fairly high rate and are an audience already online and on social media.”
Drawing on examples from across the social and behavioral sciences, “Statistics with R: Solving Problems Using Real-World Data” introduces foundational statistics concepts with beginner-friendly R programming in an exploration of the world’s tricky problems faced by the “R Team” characters. Inspired by the programming group “R Ladies,” the R Team works together to master the […]
