Faculty Profile

Brisa Sanchez

Brisa Sanchez, PhD

  • Adjunct Professor of Biostatistics
Brisa N. Sanchez is a Professor of Biostatistics. She received her PhD in Biostatistics in 2006 from Harvard University. She joined the University of Michigan in 2006 as an Assistant Research Professor, and became an Assistant Professor in 2008. Her research interests are in statistical methodology applicable to environmental epidemiology, and social epidemiology, and health disparities.

Her current methodological work involves developing robust fitting procedures and diagnostics for Structural Equation Models, and using these methods in applications to environmental health problems such as in-utero lead exposure and its effect on child development. She also conducts research on study design for longitudinal studies, in particular the design of studies involving salivary cortisol as a measure of stress in health disparities research. Sanchez also investigates the applicability of various functional data methods to studies of salivary cortisol.

Her collaborative research spans environmental epidemiology, social epidemiology, and health disparities in the areas of cardiovascular disease, stroke, and the distribution of body mass index.  Within environmental epidemiology, her work focuses on the impact of lead and air pollution exposure on birth outcomes, and child development and behavior. Her work on health disparities and social epidemiology has included the analysis of the effectiveness of school level interventions to reduce child obesity, among others.

  • PhD, Biostatistics, Harvard, 2006
  • M.Sc., Biostatistics, minor in Environmental Health, Harvard, 2003
  • M.S., Statistics, University of Texas at El Paso, 2001
  • B.S., Mathematics, minor in Physics, University of Texas at El Paso, 2000

Sanchez BN, Wu M, Raghunathan TE, Diez-Roux A (2012). Modeling the salivary cortisol profile in population research—The Multi Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis American Journal of Epidemiology in press.

Sanchez BN, Kang S, Mukherjee B (2011). A Latent variable approach to studies of gene-environment interactions in presence of multiple correlated exposures Biometrics e-pub ahead of print.

Sanchez BN, Sanchez-Vaznaugh EV, Uskila A, Baek J, Zhang L (2012). Differential Associations Between the Food Environment Near Schools and Childhood Overweight Across Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Grade American Journal of Epidemiology e-pub ahead of print.

Sanchez BN, Hu H, Litman H, Tellez-Rojo MM (2011). Statistical Methods to Study Timing of Vulnerability with Sparsely Sampled Data on Environmental Toxicants Environmental Health Perspectives 409-415.

Sanchez-Vaznaugh E, Sanchez BN, Baek J, Crawford P (2010). Competitive food and beverage policies: are they influencing childhood overweight trends Health Affairs 436-446.

Lisabeth LD, Sanchez BN, Escobar J, Hughes R, Meurer WJ, Zuniga B, Garcia N, Morgenstern LB (2010). The Food Environment in a Mexican American Community Health & Place 598-605.

Sanchez BN, Ryan LM, Budtz-Jorgensen E (2009). An estimating equations approach for latent exposure models with longitudinal outcomes Annals of Applied Statistics 830-856.

Sanchez BN, Ryan LM, Houseman AE (2008). Residual-Based diagnostics for latent variable models Biometrics 104-115.

Sanchez BN, Raghunathan TE, Diez-Roux AV, Zhu YY (2008). Combining data from two surveys to assess the effects of neighborhood characteristics on health outcomes Statistics in Medicine 5745-5763.

Sanchez BN, Butdz-Jorgensen E, Ryan LM, and Hu H (2005). Structural Equation Models: A review with Applications to Environmental Epidemiology. Journal of the American Statistical Association 1443-1455.