The Department of Epidemiology is pleased to announce the faculty appointments of Seyoung Kim, PhD, as visiting associate professor and Alexander J. Sundermann, DrPH, MPH, as visiting assistant professor.
Kim earned her BS in computer engineering from Seoul National University and her PhD in computer science, specializing in statistical machine learning, from the University of California, Irvine. She completed her postdoctoral training in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).
Before joining Pitt, Kim served as an assistant professor and later as an associate professor in the Computational Biology Department at CMU. Her research lies at the intersection of machine learning, statistical genetics and computational genomics, which has earned her a National Science Foundation Career Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and an Okawa Foundation Research Grant.
Sundermann's appointment is equally notable. His research focuses on the detection and investigation of healthcare-associated outbreaks of infectious diseases using genomic epidemiology. His work has identified multiple significant outbreaks, including a Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus outbreak linked to contrast injection in radiology and a Pseudomonas outbreak connected to a contaminated gastroscope.
An alum of the School of Public Health, Sundermann earned his doctorate in epidemiology and master’s in infectious diseases and microbiology. . He has contributed significantly to the Center for Genomic Epidemiology, helping to develop a real-time whole genomic sequencing surveillance program for rapid outbreak detection at UPMC Presbyterian. Prior to this appointment, he also served as an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
-Joe Barreto