We are EPH: Meet Sam Jaros

Tell me about yourself.

My name is Sam Jaros, and I am a 4th year PhD candidate in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health. My previous research has included a digital health intervention to decrease post-operative pain and looking at indices of spatial polarization and cardiovascular disease. My current research and my thesis projects are all about finding actionable patterns in opioid addiction to better spend limited public health resources on improving care. I first found my passion for improving care for opioid addiction while working in Appalachia in previous mining towns. The resilience of the people most affected by this highly stigmatized crisis pushes me to move this field forward. My projects aim to create tools that map the effectiveness and placement of opioid use disorder treatment centers and understand the community barriers that these clinics face.

Tell me about your research interest(s) and your training grants.

My research brings statistical modeling and geographic analyses to the front lines of public health. Particularly, I try to understand the challenges faced by local public health departments and clinics that provide care for people with opioid use disorder. We have amazing medicines and psychological therapies that can help people recover from opioid addiction. We now need to build more facilities to make these services easier to access. My thesis will contribute to that work by identifying opioid overdose hotspots and treatment deserts with geospatial analyses and categorizing community concerns with mixed-methods research.

I enrolled at Stanford as part of the Training in Advanced Data Analysis T32 mentored by Dr. Lorene Nelson. This grant allowed me to dedicate time to additional training in interview analyses, machine learning, and longitudinal data analyses. I was recently awarded an F31 individual training grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which is the first National Institute of Health grant one can receive on their path to becoming an independent researcher. I am now following through on my research and training plans from that grant to complete my thesis and graduate.

Why did you decide to pursue a PhD in Epidemiology and Clinical Research at Stanford?

After pursuing degrees in bioinformatics and sociology simultaneously while at Loyola University Chicago, I knew I was looking for additional training combining these skillsets to help improve peoples’ health. I already knew going into graduate school that I wanted to work on mixed-methods research and find trends in opioid addiction that could lead to improved care. Stanford’s epidemiology department stood out from the other schools I applied to right away. First, I would be pursuing my degree within the School of Medicine rather than a school of public health at a different school. This association means there are fewer barriers to working with clinicians and data from the hospital. Our program can also be much less structured than other programs. Rather than doing lab rotations to find a project, students can pitch their own projects and secure funding to complete them. Overall, I chose Stanford due to the network, flexibility, and independence that Stanford offers its graduate students.

What experiences/events have been important in shaping your experience at Stanford?

I started my degree in September 2020…not the best time for meeting new friends. Luckily, four other students started at the same time and were going through the same thing. That first year, we met at least weekly on Zoom to chat about life and classes. Now, we meet all the time for food, coffee, or drinks to catch up and commiserate about roadblocks. We also studied together for the written qualifying exam and practiced our oral qualifying presentations with each other. The post-COVID push to get everyone together has also snowballed into all the PhD students from every year being much closer than we were in 2020, having regular social events and more official representation on different department committees.

What do you hope to do after obtaining your degree?

My number one goal in my research is ensuring it is relevant to public health in the United States. Public health departments, especially local and rural ones, are often overburdened and under-resourced. I believe I can take the skills that I learn at Stanford and put them to good work in the world of public health. In the short term, I would like to gain experience within a public health department or company that works with public health departments to understand how their scientific structure differs from academia. Long-term, I imagine myself consulting for public health departments or working at the national or international level to better equip public health departments.

Justice and equity are a big deal in our department, and what that means to me is having a diverse set of perspectives among my classmates. Our students come from many demographic and scientific backgrounds, and my education is better because of that variety. 

What advice would you give to someone considering pursuing a degree at Stanford EPH?

The students that I see gaining the most from their time at Stanford tend to start with a good idea of the area of research they want to work in. Having a tentative plan before starting helps faculty better understand your goals when reading your application. It also allows you to easily match with likeminded mentors and hit the ground running with your research. As a department, we are passionate about great study design and great statistics. Talking about your experience with either of these topics will likely help your application.

I know you have helped with some EPH recruitment efforts. Why did you decide to get involved?

Justice and equity are a big deal in our department, and what that means to me is having a diverse set of perspectives among my classmates. Our students come from many demographic and scientific backgrounds, and my education is better because of that variety. When I was applying to graduate schools, I did not think Stanford would even consider me coming from a good but non-elite undergraduate institution where we did not have epidemiology classwork. I am glad that I was wrong and my undergraduate mentor encouraged me to apply. I now want to make sure other students like me give the application a shot so our cohorts maintain that strength.

And now you're instructing an Epi course?
My colleague Anna and I were asked to step in to teach the R Fundamentals for Health Research course since the previous professor is now leading a national cohort study for the VA. We have revamped the course to match our styles and modernize the methods. Luckily, we have many great instructors in the department for inspiration. While I have spent long nights preparing lecture materials and grading, the positive feedback and the “Oh, I get it now” from our students has made it all worth it. I genuinely find cleaning data, running analyses, and creating visualizations in R enjoyable and rewarding, and I believe some of the students see it in a similar light. It will never stop being weird for me to grade my classmates’ homework, however.

What is your favorite thing about Stanford EPH?
Every few weeks I learn about a new research resource at Stanford. It seems like whatever kind of science you want to do from wet lab to heavy computational work, there is going to be a center or department dedicated to doing it well. It is only when I talk to colleagues at different universities that I realize how much infrastructure is already available to get a project up and running. I am especially excited to collaborate with the Stanford Geospatial Center, a group of mapping specialists at Stanford Libraries, and Carina, a high-risk data processing server at Stanford Research Computing, for my thesis projects.