Jennifer Bobb, PhD, aims to apply rigorous statistical methods to address important problems in public health. She is interested in statistical issues that occur when data that were not originally collected for research purposes, such as administrative claims data or electronic health records, are used for addressing scientific questions of relevance to clinical practice and health policy.

At KPWHRI, Dr. Bobb collaborates with scientists across a broad range of research areas, including studies of aging and cognitive function, women’s health, and behavioral health. As an investigator with the Addictions Research Network, she provides statistical leadership on pragmatic clinical trials at Kaiser Permanente Washington and other health systems. She is the lead statistician on a study to evaluate whether exposure to prescription opioids during early pregnancy increases the risk of neural tube defects, as part of the Medication Exposure in Pregnancy Risk Evaluation Program funded by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as well as on the Adult Changes in Thought (ACT) study, a cohort study investigating the factors that contribute to dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and healthy aging.

Dr. Bobb also has expertise in environmental biostatistics, where she has led large-scale epidemiological investigations on the health effects of exposure to extreme heat and air pollution and worked with interdisciplinary teams to study the health impact of changing environmental stressors under global climate change. She also developed flexible modeling approaches for estimating the health effects of multi-pollutant mixtures that broadly apply to settings where a large number of exposures may interact or have complex relationships with health, along with publicly available software implementing these methods.

Dr. Bobb is an affiliate assistant professor in biostatistics at the University of Washington. She is also an associate editor of the journal Biostatistics. She serves on the Regional Advisory Board of the Western North American Region of the International Biometric Society and is a member of the American Statistical Association. Before joining KPWHRI, Dr. Bobb completed her PhD in biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2012, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.