Leah J. Welty, PhD

lwelty@northwestern.edu
312/908-1723

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Assistant Professor

Dr. Welty earned a BS (with honors) in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1995, an MA in mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis in 1998, and a PhD in statistics from the University of Chicago in 2003. Following a postdoctoral fellowship from 2003 to 2005 in the Department of Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins Univeristy, she joined the Department of Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University as an Assistant Professor. She is also a biostatistician for the Biostatistical Consulting Center.

Research Interests

Dr. Welty's research interests include formulation of statistical models for outcomes correlated over time and space and the associated challenges in estimating these models. Her recent work on the National Morbidity Mortality and Air Pollution Study (NMMAPS) has focused on formulating generalized linear models to adequately capture the short term health effects of air pollution and weather while controlling for other time-varying factors. In particular, she has been investigating Bayesian methods for distributed lag models. She has also worked on formulating covariance models for random fields and estimating likelihoods for very large data sets, using algae levels in Lake Michigan collected as part of the EEGLE project.