Postdoctoral Fellows

Ilan received a PhD in Epidemiology and Public Health from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2020. He has over a decade of experience in child protection and health, with a focus on low- and middle-income countries, marginalized groups, and humanitarian settings. Ilan received a Fulbright Research Grant and Haruv Student Research Award for his past work. His doctoral research applied quantitative methods in analyzing violence in low resource settings and causal approaches in measuring the relationship between natural hazards and violence against children. Ilan's current research at Columbia investigates longitudinal exposure to natural hazards, subjective wellbeing, and violence in childhood. His work combines traditional statistical methods and machine learning. He has an interest in ecological exposures, health, and applied statistical methods.

Born and raised on the island of Hawa’i, Christian Ka’ikekūponoaloha Dye is a kanaka maoli, or Native Hawaiian, epigenetics researcher with an interest in cardiometabolic diseases in underrepresented populations, such as Indigenous Peoples. Christian attended the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in biology. Soon after, he would start his graduate education at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa in the Department of Molecular Biosciences and Bioengineering. Here, Christian's doctoral research focused on identifying epigenetic signatures in leukocyte subpopulations across a spectrum of diseases, including insulin resistance, diabetes, and dementia, and various populations, including Native Hawaiians, Japanese Americans, and HIV infected communities. At Columbia, under the direction of Dr. Bacarreli, Christian's research focuses on utilizing epigenetic information, such as DNA methylation and non-coding RNAs, to identify potentialy mechanistic biomarkers that may explain the relationship between environmental exposures and cardiometabolic disease risk in underrepresented communities, including American Indians. Christian hopes his research will be instrumental in developing novel strategies for disease diagnosis, prevention, community interventions and targeted therapeutics.  As a kanaka maoli, Christian has been a first-hand witness to the chronic diseases that plague his people. By bridging his previous and current research training, Christian plans to develop inclusive community-based research that utilizes epigenetic information to examine the relationship between community-level health and individual cardiometabolic health in underrepresented communities, such as Native Hawaiians and other indigenous peoples, with the hopes that his research will be translatable to other underrepresented, and often at-risk communities.

Gabriella received her PhD in public health from NYU School of Global Public Health in 2022, where she was primarily affiliated with the Center for Public Health Disaster Science. Her dissertation examined the adverse consequences of child and adolescent exposure to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the context of cumulative environmental and family stress. Prior to her doctoral studies, Gabriella received her bachelor’s degree in Health and Societies from the University of Pennsylvania and was a global health research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations. Under the advisement of Drs. Pam Factor-Litvak and Joan Casey, she will continue to research how community-level environmental exposures  create and exacerbate health disparities at critical and sensitive periods of the life course.