Biography

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where I hold the Johns Hopkins Provost Postdoctoral Fellowship. I work with Dr. Elizabeth A. Stuart in the Departments of Biostatistics.

I completed my Ph.D. in Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under Dr. Tanya P. Garcia, where my dissertation developed robust and efficient estimators for regression models with right-censored covariates, with applications to Huntington disease progression.

Research

My research focuses on statistical methodology for settings where data are incomplete or distributed — whether due to censoring, missingness, or the practical reality that data often cannot leave the institutions that collect it. I develop estimators that are robust and efficient in these settings, and I am currently working on federated learning frameworks that allow multiple clinical sites to draw joint inferences without sharing individual-level data. I collaborate broadly across health domains. My work has touched on neurological disease, pulmonary health, preterm kidney health, cardiovascular outcomes, and physical activity — and I find that moving across applied areas consistently sharpens the methods.

I am always happy to connect with researchers working on related problems. Feel free to reach out at jvazqu18[at]jh[dot]edu.