Senior Research Scientist

Sue has over 25 years of experience collaborating on infectious disease research in treatments for HIV and TB, with an emphasis in pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, and special emphasis on evaluating drug-drug interactions. She has coauthored more than 64 publications in peer-reviewed journals.

As Senior Research Scientist, Sue is the statistical advisor to the NIAID/DAIDS Clinical Pharmacology Quality Assurance (CPQA) Proficiency Testing (PT) Program, tasked with evaluating the accuracy and precision of drug concentrations reported by pharmacology laboratories that conduct assays for NIAID/DAIDS-funded grants.  In addition to designing the data architecture and overseeing analysis and reporting for the Proficiency Testing Program, she has investigated factors associated with the accuracy and precision of drug concentrations as reported by pharmacology assay laboratories.

In settings of polypharmacy – such as administration of antiretroviral medications (for treating people with HIV) with anti-TB medications, or with drugs used for hormone-based contraception, she has served as Senior Research Scientist with the AIDS Clinical Trials Group / Advancing Clinical Therapeutics Globally (ACTG) network, designing studies:  to quantify the magnitude of drug-drug interactions; to estimate necessary changes to dose amount or frequency when drugs are co-administered; to assess the relationship of adverse events and drug efficacy to drug doses, concentrations, and PK parameters.  She collaborated on the design of a study, conducted in participants infected with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, to assess the safety of adding two new TB drugs, each with a distinct and novel mechanism of action, to multi-drug background therapy.  She oversaw statistical analyses for the study, which included analysis of potential prolongation of QT intervals measured via electrocardiogram.

Sue earned her Bachelor of Science in Cellular and Molecular Biology and her PhD in Biostatistics at the University of Washington in Seattle.  She was a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California San Francisco.  Prior to her joining Frontier Science in 1999, she served as Senior Biostatistician at Harvard Community Health Plan/Harvard Pilgrim Health Care.