Kirsten Wiens
Temple University, PA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Vibrio bacteria, picked up from seafood or from contact with warm coastal water, cause illness ranging from mild stomach upset to necrotizing fasciitis and bloodstream infection, where a quarter to half of patients die. Cases in the United States are rising, and because severe infections progress fast, survival depends on recognizing high-risk patients quickly.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
vibriosis
Vibrio vulnificus
foodborne illness
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Identify which sociodemographic, clinical, and environmental factors predict hospitalization and death from Vibrio infection, using multi-level models of CDC COVIS and FoodNet surveillance records that control for confounders at individual and county levels.
- Examine temporal and geographic trends in severe vibriosis outcomes across the nationwide passive surveillance system and the ten active FoodNet sentinel sites.
- Link individual case records to county-level demographic, health behavior, and environmental data to quantify how community context shapes the risk of severe infection beyond individual factors such as liver disease and age.
- Develop and validate a county-level risk stratification tool for severe vibriosis against historical outcomes from both surveillance systems, to guide public health resource allocation.
More about the research
Yet current risk assessment mostly watches the environment, tracking water temperature and flooding, which can say when and where bacteria are abundant but not who will become severely ill. This project asks whether combining information about patients and about the communities they live in can predict severe outcomes well enough to be useful in a clinic or a health department.
Why it matters
Severe vibriosis kills a large fraction of those it strikes, and treatment must start early to prevent death or amputation. Risk tools that flag high-risk patients for clinicians and high-risk counties for health officials could direct prevention messaging and emergency resources where they matter most, protecting Gulf Coast residents, marine industry workers, and other coastal populations whose exposure rises after storms and flooding.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Theodore C. White
University of Missouri-Kansas City, MO·Public Health & Epidemiology
Estimate regional U.S. trends in incidence, hospitalization and death from major fungal diseases, using de-identified Oracle/Cerner electronic health records for over 96 million patients after correcting for data biases.
Arnab Ghosh
Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Test whether extreme heat events raise county-level COVID-19 risk nationwide, combining Johns Hopkins case data, census data and National Weather Service records from 2020–2022 in spatiotemporal models with quasi-experimental designs.
Jarron Saint Onge
University of Kansas, KS·Public Health & Epidemiology
Determine how mortality among rural women varies with county-level demographic factors and how that relationship has changed over time, using multiple secondary demographic and health datasets across degrees of rurality.
The school
Temple University: 22 labs on PI Pages, $315M a year on research, 238 research doctorates a year.
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