Biography
Professor with tenure, Departments of Family Medicine and Clinical Epidemiology, Joint appointments in CTSI and Behavioral and Community Health Sciences in GSPH
I love vaccine policy analysis, which led to serving on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), first as a liaison and later as a voting member, where I chaired the influenza and adult vaccination working groups. This love led to creating the science upon which policies could be built. Thus, our team’s experience is diverse, from COVID outpatient decision rules to vaccine trials, from test-negative case-control studies of influenza vaccine effectiveness to randomized cluster trials of measures to increase vaccination rates; and from vaccine modeling using decision analytic and agent-based techniques to public health bioethics. I practice at the East Liberty Family Health Care Center where I serve on the Quality Assurance and Ethics Committees.
I authored >300 publications on immunizations and vaccine-preventable diseases: Zimmerman NCBI Bibliography.
Professional Affiliations
- Christian Medical Association
- American Academy of Family Physicians
- Society of Teachers of Family Medicine
- Association for Prevention, Teaching and Research
- Pennsylvania Academy of Family Physicians
- Fellow, American Academy of Family Physicians
- Fellow, American College of Preventive Medicine
- Infectious Disease Society of America
- Residency: Grant Medical Center, Family Practice
- B.A., Chemistry, cum laude, from Miami University (OH) in 1982
- M.D. from Ohio State University in 1986
- M.P.H. in Epidemiology from University of Minnesota in 1991
- M.A. in Bioethics from Trinity International University 2007
- Fellowship, University of Minnesota
Education & Training
We are examining multiple immune parameters in weak or robust vaccine responses, that include single cell transcriptional and chromatin (multi-ome) profiling of the innate and adaptive compartments, cytokine profiling, multi-dimensional antibody profiling, enumeration of HA-specific memory B and plasma cell precursors, coupled with novel methods for machine learning to reveal dominant latent factors underlying highly variable immune responses in older or obese individuals and associated molecular mechanisms.
Uncovering latent factors underlying weak and robust responses to influenza vaccine in healthy and obese older adults
Outpatient VE for seasonal flu, pandemic flu and RSV in a large, diverse network. The CDC’s outpatient influenza vaccine effectiveness network [PI] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/us-flu-ve-network.htm#:~:text=The%....
Flu vaccine effectiveness in those hospitalized in a large diverse health system. The CDC’s inpatient influenza vaccine effectiveness network (HAIVEN) [PI]. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/haiven.html
Analyzing Adult Pneumococcal Vaccination Implementation in the Underserved [NIH, Co-I]. Decisional analytic modeling will address the most cost-effective pneumococcal polysaccharide and conjugate vaccination policies for the US.