Staff Profile

Researcher Studies Pregnancy Exposure and Risk of Birth Defects

Nedghie Adrien, a graduate researcher and teaching assistant in the Department of Epidemiology, uses novel epidemiologic methods to analyze patient statistics and provide evidence-based information about medication exposure to people who are pregnant.

Nedghie Adrien says her love of public health was borne while volunteering at a maternal and child health clinic in her hometown of Port-au-Prince, Haiti after undergraduate school. Instead of following her parents’ footsteps into the medical field, she decided that she wanted to influence health at the population level, rather than the individual level.

“Once I knew what public health was, there was no other option,” she says.

Now, as a graduate researcher and teaching assistant in the Department of Epidemiology, and a third-year PhD candidate, Adrien is pursuing a variety of research interests with a goal to translate her epidemiologic work into evidence-based policy changes in low and middle-income countries.

As a research assistant, Adrien is immersed in perinatal epidemiology. Using the National Birth Defects Prevention Study, she studies medication exposure during pregnancy, and whether those exposures are associated with risks of birth defects. She uses novel epidemiologic methods and machine learning to analyze patient statistics and “provide better evidence for people who are pregnant as they’re trying to make decisions about which medications to take.” For the past five semesters, Adrien has also been a teaching assistant for Applications of Intermediate Epidemiology, taught this semester by Samantha Parker Kelleher, where she helps students apply epidemiologic methods through data analysis.

Adrien is also interested in vaccine research, and has studied vaccine hesitancy and effectiveness, infection control, and antimicrobial resistance. Prior to joining SPH, she worked as an epidemiologist for the CDC Foundation, providing programmatic and technical assistance to immunization campaigns for oral cholera in Zambia and Uganda. As countries race to administer the COVID-19 vaccine amid the latest surge in cases, Adrien says it’s imperative that government officials and health experts improve the way they communicate science to the public to allay public fears about vaccines.

“The US and other countries are still struggling with science communication, and how to use resources that are already available, and institutions that people trust, in order to answer their questions,” says Adrien, who has also worked on education efforts about the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine in Senegal for the CDC. “Vaccine hesitancy is rooted in very real fears and a history for a lot of people being harmed by the medical industry. There needs to be better science communication that is accessible to people, so that you can acknowledge why they’re fearful, and then figure out how to translate information to help ease those fears.”

Science-based vaccine education is also critical to combat the misinformation that can spread rapidly and unchecked on social media, she says. When Senegal began administering the HPV vaccine nationwide, there was concern among the public about whether the vaccine would affect fertility, or whether it was a government ploy to control population growth, says Adrien.

“With access to social media, it’s easy to watch a video that you think makes sense as long as it’s sprinkled with bits of science,” she says. Based on social media algorithms, “if you watch one video, the next one that is suggested to you will be similar to the one you watched.”

At SPH, Adrien says her colleagues have shaped her experience as a staff member and a student.

“When I think of my experience at SPH, I think of Shelley Barnes—without her, the Epidemiology Department would crumble,” she says. “I think about Jaimie Gradus, who has not only been an excellent mentor, but also a friend. I think about Martha Werler, who strapped my mattress to the roof of her car and helped me move from my apartment. And I think about Matt Fox, who sat and talked to me when I was having a bad day.

“I have struggled to find professors who not only cared about me as a student, but as a person and as a colleague, and I’ve really found that at SPH,” says Adrien. “I have concrete examples of people going above and beyond what I think is the normal responsibility for a faculty member, and that’s not something I take for granted.”