Reza Yaesoubi, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies and the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. He is a health decision scientist whose research focuses on developing and applying analytical methods to inform data-driven and value-based decisions in clinical care, public health, and global health. His primary area of expertise lies in guiding decisions when evidence and data evolve too rapidly for static policies or guidelines to suffice—for example, during outbreaks of novel pathogens or the spread of antimicrobial resistance. He is also interested in advancing the theoretical and methodological foundations of medical decision-making and health care resource allocation.
Dr. Yaesoubi serves as an Associate Editor for Health Care Management Science and as an Editorial Board Member for Medical Decision Making. He was the Scientific Review Co-Chair for the 2024 and 2025 annual meetings of the Society for Medical Decision Making.
Mariana Raniere, PhD
Post-Doctoral Associate
Mariana is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Yale School of Public Health, with previous experience as a Senior Mathematical Modeler at the UK Department of Health and Social Care. She earned her PhD in Computer Science from Queen Mary University of London, where her research focused on using Bayesian Network models to support healthcare decision-making. She also holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Statistics, and her expertise spans machine learning, decision science, and statistical modeling. She work at the intersection of machine learning and decision science, developing models that drive evidence-based decision-making in healthcare. Her interests center on applying data-driven approaches to inform policy and clinical practice, with a focus on building tools that are accurate, actionable, and advance health equity and social impact.
Aldon Whitehead, MD
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Aldon is a research fellow at Yale University. After completing his undergraduate studies in the Midwest and medical residency at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he moved to Connecticut where he is completing his infectious diseases fellowship. His current focus is on decision-analytic modeling to optimize care for patients with refractory or incurable diseases. His work examines disease trajectories, salvage treatments, and the value of interventions aimed at maximizing patients’ remaining time and quality of life. He is currently examining the cost-effectiveness of salvage therapies for refractory pulmonary nontuberculous mycobacterium.
Fatima (Tima) Mikdashi, MS
PhD Student
Tima is a PhD student at Yale’s Department of Health Policy and Management (Economics Track). She holds a bachelor’s degree in bioengineering from the University of Maryland, College Park and a MPhil in Population Health Sciences from the University of Cambridge. She previously worked as a data consultant in the Office of the Secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) during the COVID-19 pandemic. She is interested in decision science, policy modeling, and health equity.
Xavier Guaracha, BS
Junior Specialist
Xavier graduated from Yale College in 2025 with a B.S. in Statistics and Data Science. His research focuses on public health modeling and forecasting, as well as leveraging deep learning to optimize public health responses.
Ze Wang, BA, BS
Junior Specialist
Ze is a Junior Specialist at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Brandeis University and a Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics from Columbia University. His undergraduate research at Columbia University Medical Center focused on pulse wave inverse problems, where he first developed deep learning models to approximate solutions and later applied analytical and numerical methods to solve the governing partial differential equations. His research interests include decision science, mathematical modeling, and simulation, with a focus on applying quantitative methods to inform health policy and clinical decision-making
Yashleen Sharma, MS
Junior Specialist
Yashleen is a Junior Research Specialist at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies. She specializes in mathematical modeling, algorithm design, and computational methods to study infectious disease dynamics, integrating compartmental models (SIR) and agent-based models with social determinants of health. Her work highlights how structural inequities and stigma shape disparities in infection outcomes and supports evidence-based health policy. She aims to further bridge epidemiological modeling with biomedical sciences to strengthen early detection, forecasting, and interventions for emerging diseases. She holds a B.S. in Applied Mathematics with an emphasis in Computer Science and a minor in Physics, as well as an M.S. in Mathematics, where her research focused on infectious disease modeling.
Ritviksiddha Penchala, BS
Junior Specialist
Ritvik is a Junior Specialist at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies. He earned his B.S. in Computer Science with a specialization in Bioinformatics from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 2024. As a Research Assistant at UCSD, he developed automated proteomic pipelines to analyze unannotated microbiome samples for predicting immune responses and applied machine learning techniques to large-scale genomic datasets to study psychiatric outcomes. His current interests focus on leveraging innovative data science methodologies to drive clinically meaningful advances in health and medicine.
Former Lab Members
- Post-Doctoral Associates
- Christoph Zimmer, PhD (2015 – 2018)
- S. M. Niaz Arifin, PhD (2016 – 2018)
- Xuecheng (Ethan) Yin, PhD (2021 – 2023)
- Rachel Murray-Watson, PhD (2023 – 2024)
- Bruno Alves Maciel, PhD (2024-2025)
- Marcy Ekanayake-Weber, PhD (2024-2025)
- Post-Graduate Associates
- Shiying You (2020 – 2021)
- Qin Xi (2022)
- Jingwen Li (2022 – 2023)
- Fatima (Tima) Mikdashi (2023 – 2024)
- MPH, MS, and Medical Students
- Michelle Guo (2016-2017)
- Ava Yap (2016-2018)
- Maya Mahin (2016-2017)
- Zongbo Li (2018-2019)
- Sydney Pryor (2019-2020)
- Jingyi Meng (2020-2021)