Lauren Martini

city research scientist

New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Queens, NY

January 2017 - Present

Office of data aggregation, translation, and analytics, formerly the office of Informatics and Research, in the Bureau of Mental Health Community Engagement Policy and Practice

• Collaborate with internal and external stakeholders to identify best approach to ensure programmatic decision making is data-informed including ad-hoc analyses with very tight timelines and longer term projects

• Create user-friendly and interactive dashboards to inform program planning and decision making, e.g., examining geographic trends related to emergency service utilization for emotional disturbance and identifying those occurring within a block of an identified site such as homeless shelter with supportive services

• Project manage complex collaborative projects across organizations, ensuring timely execution of tasks by partners to prevent pain points, and effectively communicating across stakeholders for awareness

• Led data collection efforts including creating new frameworks, developing methodologies and guidance, establishing data collection and management protocols, building an eHR platform to support partners’ client management, and performing related governance duties on several initiatives, e.g., Building Resilience in Youth and Promoting Mental Health among Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders

• Functionally code across languages to ensure appropriate coding language to implement the best solution as well as effective translation depending on need and collaborative partner as well as the right

• Engage with staff to provide guidance and technical capacity for projects including website update and re-design, reports for bureau and divisional programs, and supporting database management and design for new programs

• Analyze large, administrative data for reporting to internal and external stakeholder (e.g., Medicaid, electronic health records, emergency response from FDNY), and developing, maintaining, and documenting large databases for ease of use by other analysts in Division

• Provide technical support and mentor analysts throughout the Division, leading code reviews and participating in pair coding to expand skills especially with difficult tasks, in addition to acting as primary preceptor and mentorship to many interns in the prestigious HRTP program

• Launched the Divisional Analysts Workgroup in January 2020, a quarterly meeting of analysts within the division that aims to address gaps in institutional and technical knowledge, as well as providing support and networking infrastructure throughout the division

• Active member of Mental Hygiene Race to Justice Division Action Team (DAT), a group that supports divisional efforts for diversity, inclusion, racial equity, and social justice goals since January 2019

• Bureau Equity Lead, member of the Data and Analytic subgroup, member of the Strategic Planning committee, DAT lead on Equity Champion implementation and evaluation subgroups

• Activated as part of the Incident Command System to respond to Measles (2019) and COVID-19, selected roles are highlighted below

EPIDATA ANALYST, SURVEILLANCE EPIDEMIOLOGY, SEP 2020-MAR 2021

• Collaborated with Trace to ensure continuity of work and definitions across two data systems, Maven and Salesforce

• Incorporated more efficient syntax to import newly requested data fields and improved efficiency of existing contact import processes

• Translated necessary syntax from R to SAS to ensure comparable coding schemes across programs

• Improved upon existing processes in RHIO electronic health record data to group COVID-related hospital stays using more accurate and computationally efficient methods to reduce processing time

EVALUATION LEAD/Chief Evaluation Officer, TRACE/nYC Test and Trace, MAY-AUG 2020

• Collaborated with the Mayor’s Office, NYC Health and Hospitals, and Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) to launch Trace, the city-wide contact tracing program, which went on to investigate over 1.4 million cases in 55 languages and identified over 1.8 million contacts before it was concluded in May 2022

• Managed data and evaluation team, which included 25 senior analysts, during planning and early implementation phase of Trace, the city-wide contact tracing program, providing guidance and leadership to empower and develop the team including advocating for team

• Led data governance for program including documentation of general processes, survey, and data collection, and ensuring adherence to confidentiality protocols and provided leadership and technical support required to produce cleaned analytic dataset, establish data management and systems processes, and develop automated reporting infrastructures, which was implemented throughout the duration of the COVID emergency response

• Liaised with internal and external stakeholders, coordinating information sharing across several agencies and met with other agencies to discuss lessons learned, transfer knowledge, and troubleshoot

• Generated responses to ad-hoc requests with quick turnaround, including identifying potential cases and contacts for additional outreach, redirecting and reporting out-of-jurisdiction or facilities cases, reconciling hiring lists within and across several vendors and agencies, and any additional questions that arose as the team was standardizing automated reporting mechanisms

OPERATIONS AND REPORTING ANALYST, INTEGRATED DATA TEAM (IDT), MAR-APR 2020

• Created staffing dashboard used throughout Agency COVID-19 response to assess status of staff response as well as to identify potential staff to be activated, assess divisional compliance, and facilitate administrative requirements for each response group

• Led development and implementation of agency-wide survey to assess employee technological needs, in collaboration with senior leadership across the Agency, to ensure effective transition to at-home work for Agency staff

• Assisted staff who were having difficulty with dashboards or survey by helping to troubleshoot, as needed

• Mentored staff within team to provide technical and analytic support as well as to learn how to navigate new products

• Agency liaison for Tableau Online during launch and initial implementation phase

technical project lead

January 2016 - December 2016

Mount sinai south nassau, oceanside, ny

Department of PREOPERATIVE services

• Manage a small team of interdisciplinary personnel responsible for scheduling, billing, and supply management in perioperative services

• Create, implement, and migrate patient databases between system versions to facilitate necessary version upgrade

• Ensure clear, transparent communication throughout project, especially during transition period, to ensure a shared understanding during the implementation phase and establish a protocol for troubleshooting and navigating other issues

• Supervised primarily administrative staff in software testing to prevent disruption during system upgrade

• Problem-solve back-end database inputs and consult with contractors and staff to implement a comprehensive, updated database

• Remedied technical issues and back-end database inputs to fix inventory and consult with contractors and staff to implement a comprehensive, updated stock room database and improve upon automated restocking system

• Research, identify, and enter operation-specific surgeon preference data as well as improve reporting to facilitate use by operating room

• Participated as a consultant to the Statistical Governance Board

Consultant

May 2013 - September 2013

Food Research and Action Center, Washington, DC

Program Participation for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC)

• Analyzed and prepared a report examining the national WIC participation among various subgroups

• Applied estimation methods to ascertain state-level eligibility and evaluated multiple measures of program use

• Created maps, graphs, and other presentations regarding WIC participation used internally and, subsequently, presented externally to legislative partners, funders, and other key stakeholders

Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) and Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act (2010) Assessment

• Designed, planned and administered survey to state agencies to evaluate the comprehensiveness of program offerings and implementation of the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act (HHFKA; 2010)

• Analyzed survey responses and prepared a report, in collaboration with programmatic staff and other experts, detailing the stark contrasts in level of state adaptation, knowledge of departments charged with implementation, program offerings before HHFKA, and level of intended implementation after HHFKA

Graduate Assistant

August 2011 - December 2015

University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC

analyst, SEARCH for Diabetes in Youth Study

• Analyzed data and produced reports on socioeconomic disparities, spatial access, and perception of food environment in the Food Environment and Perception Study

• Assisted with administrative study elements, data entry and management for three sites, and conducted preliminary analyses for Food Security Ancillary Study

analyst and data manageR, Midlands Family Study

• Preformed data management for large-scale primary data collection study assessing modifiable barriers to food security in households, which captured the largest number of surveyed households experiencing very low food security in children of any survey at the time

• Collaborate with key stakeholders and provide analytic support to ensure data-driven decision making processes including weekly reporting described

• Reported weekly progress at team meetings and identified steps necessary to improve upon data quality, linkage, and consistency to multidisciplinary team

• Reconciled and linked data from several input sources including spatial data and census estimates to deliver final analytic dataset

• Wrote extensive documentation for linkage, coding, and other relevant processes to assist investigators with planned follow up work

• Proposed and, in collaboration, prepared several manuscripts including the following:

  • Examining study recruitment trends and evaluating efficacy of methods used to target participants with households experiencing very-low food security in children,

  • Evaluate qualitative data provided in the screening process to assess dietary changes (strategies and reductions) associated with food insecurity, and;

  • Employ novel methods, more specifically propensity scores and GIS, to evaluate the effects that neighborhoods (specifically deprivation) have on food security status above and beyond individual-level factors.

lab assistant, Exercise Science and Sleep Lab

• Engaged in several of the lab’s several ongoing studies:

  • Exercise-based RCT attempting to lessen the severity of combat stress-related PTSD symptoms (InTRUST)

  • RCT of sleep restriction in older adults who sleep more than average (Multi-site Sleep Study)

  • Large-scale data collection that repeatedly surveyed participants during basic combat training at Fort Jackson in South Carolina

• Assisted lab members to facilitate the progress of these studies in any number of roles including study planning and logistics, interaction with study participants, recorded participant information including biological measurements, screened subjects into the study, created materials for lab-related promotion, and conducted data collection in a novel environment

• Analyzed correlates of anger in veterans, primary data collected by a previous student, created tables and providing information to be used in publication

program support, Sumter County Walks

• Assisted with study planning, designing of measures, and implementation of a community-based walking intervention using social networks

Practicum

July 2010 - January 2011

Intern

January 2010 - May 2010

Legislative Intern

January 2009 - May 2009