Bio
Alyssa Howren is a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University’s Department of Epidemiology and Population Health in the School of Medicine. She completed her MSc and PhD training at the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences during which she was a trainee at Arthritis Research Canada. Her PhD training was supported by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Doctoral Award, along with UBC’s Wayne Riggs Interdisciplinary Scholarship in Pharmaceutical Sciences and Andrew Nord Fellowship in Rheumatology. Her research focuses on using multiple data sources to provide evidence to disentangle the complex relationship between depression and anxiety with inflammatory arthritis and assess how people living with inflammatory arthritis are treated for their comorbid mental disorders. Methodological approaches in Dr. Howren’s work have included systematic reviews, qualitative research, mixed methods, and population-based studies using linked administrative health databases. She was awarded a CIHR Fellowship for her postdoctoral research at Stanford University which aims to evaluate whether biases in clinical decision-making contribute to the sex and gender differences observed in the diagnosis of major depressive disorder.