Current Scholars

Postdoc; Department of Neurosurgery
University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB)

Hohyun Cho, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist and computer scientist who serves as a Research Scientist in the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His expertise spans human intracranial electrophysiology, computational modeling, and brain-computer interfaces, with research focused on understanding how cortical and subcortical circuits generate human behavior using tools such as stereo EEG and single-neuron recordings. His work has contributed to peer-reviewed publications, a U.S. patent related to brain-computer interface methods, and the development of novel analytical approaches for characterizing neural oscillations in human electrophysiological recordings.

Postdoc; Department of Family and Community Medicine
University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB)

Dr. Katie Ellison, PhD, RDN is a registered dietitian nutritionist and a T32-funded Nutrition Obesity Research Center postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Family and Community Medicine. She is training as a translational research scientist focused on improving the implementation, effectiveness, and scalability of clinical obesity treatments. She has earned multiple honors for her research and impact, including the American Society for Nutrition’s George Bray Obesity Research Student Award, UAB’s Howerde E. Sauberlich Award for Excellence in Research in Nutrition Sciences, and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Foundation’s Mary Abbott Hess Award for innovative culinary/nutrition programming.

Mentor: Gabriel Tajeu, DrPH, MPH
Postdoc; General Internal Medicine & Population Science
University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB)

Ene Mercy Enogela MPH, PhD, earned her PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. During her doctoral training, her research focused on structural and life-course determinants of cardiovascular disease recovery and functional independence among older adults. Her work also examined reserve and resilience in cardiovascular disease and explored factors associated with recovery trajectories and post-discharge outcomes in aging populations. Currently, her research examines access to and participation in evidence-based cardiovascular care, with particular interest in improving cardiac rehabilitation utilization and recovery after cardiovascular hospitalization. She also studies care delivery strategies, including home, community, and hybrid-based rehabilitation models, and their role in improving cardiac rehabilitation uptake, reducing hospital readmissions, and improving patient outcomes.

Mentor: Gareth Dutton, PhD
Postdoc; General Internal Medicine & Population Science
University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB)

Enid Keseko is a nutrition professional who has completed her doctorate in Health Promotion, Education, and Behavior from the University of South Carolina. Her research interests focus on diet-related chronic disease prevention, weight loss maintenance, the use of media and technology in nutrition and health education, and the implementation of nutrition interventions. She has experience in mixed methods research, and her doctoral work has contributed to intervention-based studies focused on nutrition education, dietary behavior change, and diabetes prevention among adults with obesity in the United States.

Postdoc; Internal Medicine and Pediatrics
University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB)

Kristin is a new UAB Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine and Pediatrics, after recently completing her combined residency in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics also at UAB. She completed her PhD in Biostatistics in 2020 as part of the UAB Medical Scientist Training Program. Prior to medical school, she completed her MPH in Health Behavior followed by a policy fellowship at the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute in 2013. Her clinical interest is in transition medicine and her clinical effort is devoted to the Staging Transition for Every Patient (STEP) clinic. Her research will initially focus on prevalence and healthcare utilization patterns of children with medical complexity and adults with pediatric onset medical complexity, with a goal of exploring effective health care delivery models for these populations.

Postdoc; Division of Cardiovascular Diseases
University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB)

Vibhu Parcha, MD, is a Cardiovascular Disease Fellow on the ABIM Research Pathway and Chief Fellow at the UAB Heersink School of Medicine. His research interrogates the exposomic determinants of heart failure, examining how cumulative adverse social, structural, and biological exposures converge to drive cardiomyopathy across a translational continuum that spans population cohort epidemiology to hiPSC-derived cardiac organoid systems. As a COERE Scholar, he aims to apply health services and outcomes research methodology to elucidate how the adverse social exposome shapes the trajectory from structural marginalization to incident heart failure, translating those discoveries into community-embedded implementation strategies that expand equitable access to cardiovascular preventive care for the underserved communities of the Deep South.