Rolina van Gaalen studies the safety of pharmaceutical products (vaccines and drugs), and is interested in the accurate statistical modeling of exposures to these products. Her research focuses on the relationship between (1) individual- and population-level, time-varying antibiotic use and (2) the time to the emergence of antibiotic resistance. Of particular interest is whether certain dosing regimens and drug combinations are more strongly associated with the emergence of resistance than others. Rolina’s broad background and interest in other modeling techniques, such as Bayesian statistics, has lead to her involvement in projects on influenza and outbreak detection using genotypic and spatial data.
Background
Rolina obtained her doctoral degree in epidemiology at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Her dissertation in pharmacovigilance focuses on the impact on time to detection of exposure model misspecification, that is, the prospective surveillance of the association between drug dosage and the time to an adverse event (survival analysis). Rolina holds both a bachelor’s and a master's degree in applied mathematics from the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada.