FACULTY Vincent Agboto, PhD, MS Assistant Professor/Director, Meharry Medical College Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Biostatistics Vanderbilt University Medical Center l Nashville , Tennessee Dr. Agboto’s areas of research interests include the development of new Bayesian methodologies to design experiments and novel ways to design health disparity epidemiological studies. He is an adjunct assistant professor in the department of biostatistics at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He is currently involved in many National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Center of Disease Control (CDC) funded collaborative health disparity research in youth violence, injury prevention, health disparities in HIV/AIDS, diabetes and cancer with faculty at Meharry Medical College and Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Dr. Agboto is involved in development and community health projects in the United States and Togo (West Africa). He has programming skills in SAS, SPSS, Stata, Splus and R, Matlab and Mathematica. He also has extensive experience on Linux workstations as well as in the Windows and Mac environments. Donald J. Alcendor, PhD, MS Associate Professor Center for AIDS Health Disparities Research Division of Microbial & Immunology and Obstetrics & Gynecology Principal Investigator & Director of the Community Outreach Core, Project SAVED Meharry Medical College l Nashville , Tennessee Dr. Alcendor research interest is Bacterial Vaginosis and Increase Risk for HIV-1 Acquisition; KSHV Regulation of Fibulins in Kaposi’s sarcoma: Implications for the Role of Extracellular Matrix Proteins in Tumorigenesis (AIDS related malignancy); Identification of Dysregulated Genes in the Brain after HIV Infection: Implications for HIV associated Dementia; and Models for Cytomegalovirus Induced Congenital Disease and its impact on the blood-brain barrier. Selected as a minority scholar in Cancer Research by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), he has also received the Nashville Business Journal Health Care Hero Award in Research. He is a committee member on the independent Research Evaluation and Decision Panel (REDP) for the AIDS Cancer and Specimen Resource of the NCI-AIDS Malignancy Program. He is a Brain-onchip investigator in partnership with Vanderbilt and the Cleveland Clinic. Mohammad Z. Al-Hamdan, PhD Senior Research Scientist Universities Space Research Association National Space Science and Technology Center l Huntsville, Alabama Dr. Al-Hamdan received his PhD and MS in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He is a Senior Research Scientist with the Universities Space Research Association at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL and an adjunct assistant professor at the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and an adjunct assistant professor at the School of Public Health of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His research interests include the applications of remote sensing and GIS to hydrology and air quality modeling, environmental assessment and public health. Dr. Al-Hamdan has been involved in a number of environment and health linkage projects that are funded by NASA, CDC and/or NIH, and has published numerous articles on environmental public health issues. He is working with NIMHD/ Health Disparities Research Center of Excellence at Meharry on Environmental Health and large data sets. MAHRTISE 2013
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