Rajib Paul

Dr. Rajib Paul is an associate professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Public Health Sciences and affiliate faculty of the School of Data Science at  UNC Charlotte.

Dr. Paul has a broad spectrum of research interests. His areas of expertise include Bayesian methods, big data analysis, spatial and spatio-temporal statistics, stochastic computation (Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms), and the applications of statistics to environmental, epidemiological (public and community health), and health policy-related problems. After graduating from the Ohio State University with a Ph.D. degree in Statistics, he joined Western Michigan University (WMU) as a faculty in the Department of Statistics. He was an Associate Director and one of the founding members of the Health Data Research Analysis and Mapping (HDReAM) Center at the WMU. He has research experience in health disparities, environmental health, population health, and social and infectious disease epidemiology. His research focuses on identifying socioeconomic and geographic disparities in health outcomes and health service utilization.

Dr. Paul worked on research projects funded by the National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, DHHS Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Michigan.

Recent Updates

• May 2021: As a lead principal investigator, Dr. Paul has been awarded a School of Data Science seed grant for the project titled “Objective Measures of Structural Racism.”
• April 2021: As a lead principal investigator, Dr. Paul has been awarded American Public Health Association – Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Research grant for the project titled “Fusing National and Local Health Data for Geospatial Analyses to Mitigate Motor Vehicle Crash Injury and Deaths from Alcohol and Substance Use.”
• March 2021: Dr. Paul and Dr. Arif’s article on Covid-19 has been awarded the “Article of the Year” by the Editorial Board of the Journal of Rural Health: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7361905/
• January 2021: Dr. Arif and Dr. Paul are co-editing a special issue on Chronic Disease Epidemiology in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph/special_issues/Chronic_Disease_Epidemiology
• January 2021: Dr. Jean-Claude Thill and Dr. Paul’s podcast on Visualizing the COVID-19 Pandemic through Data Science: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1069000/7243306
• August 2020: Dr. Paul’s (with Dr. Jean-Claude Thill and Dr. Shi Chen) work on Visualizing COVID-19 Pandemic: https://inside.charlotte.edu/news-features/2020-08-07/visualizing-covid-19-pandemic
• July 2020: Dr. Paul and Dr. Arif’s study highlights disparities in COVID-19 in urban and rural areas https://inside.charlotte.edu/news-features/2020-07-27/study-highlights-disparities-covid-19-urban-and-rural-areas

Peer-reviewed Journal Publications

1. Adeyemi, O. J.*, Arif, A., & Paul, R. (2023). Poverty, Health Care Access Barriers, and Functional
   Limitations among Individuals with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: An 11-Year Cross-
   sectional Analysis, 2008-2018, accepted for Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved.
2. Borchering, R. K., Mullany, L. C., Howerton, E., Chinazzi, M., Smith, C. P., Qin, M., …, Paul,
   R.…, & Lessler, J. (2023). Impact of SARS-CoV-2 vaccination of children ages 5–11 years on
   COVID-19 disease burden and resilience to new variants in the United States, November
   2021–March 2022: A multi-model study. The Lancet Regional Health-Americas, 17, 100398.
3. Hatami, F., Chen, S., Paul, R., & Thill, J. C. (2022). Simulating and forecasting the COVID-19
   spread in a US Metropolitan region with a spatial SEIR model. International Journal of
   Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(23), 15771.
4. Adeyemi, O., Paul, R., Delmelle, E., DiMaggio, C., & Arif, A. (2022). Road Environment
   Characteristics and Fatal Crash Injury During the Rush and Non-Rush Hour Periods in the US:
   Model Testing and Cluster Analysis. Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology, 100562.
5. Paul, R., Han, D., DeDoncker, E., & Prieto, D. (2022). Dynamic downscaling and daily nowcasting from influenza surveillance data. Statistics in Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1002/sim.9502
6. Truelove, S., Smith, C. P., Qin, M., Mullany, L. C., Borchering, R. K., Lessler, J., …, Paul, R., …& Viboud, C. (2022). Projected resurgence of COVID-19 in the United States in July-December 2021 resulting from the increased transmissibility of the Delta variant and faltering vaccination. Elife, 11, e73584. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.73584
7. Paul, R., Adeyemi, O.*, & Arif, A. A. (2022). Estimating mortality from coal workers’ pneumoconiosis among Medicare beneficiaries with pneumoconiosis using binary regressions for spatially sparse data. American Journal of Industrial Medicine, 65(4), 262-267. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajim.23330
8. Day, A., Curtis, A., Paul, R., Shi, C.*, Quist, L., and Hicks, L. (2022): Access to Adequate Prenatal Care and Delivery Services among Female Youth in Foster Care: Michigan Medicaid Claim Analysis, accepted for Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal.
9. Miller, T. A.*, Paul, R., Forthofer, M., and Wurdeman, S. R. (2022): Reduced functional mobility is associated with a history of injurious falls among adult lower limb prosthesis users, accepted for Annals of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine.
10. Adeyemi, O. J.*, Paul, R., DiMaggio, C., Delmelle, E., and Arif, A. A. (2022): An assessment of the nonfatal crash risks associated with substance use during rush and non-rush hour periods, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 234, 109386 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2022.109386.
11. Adeyemi, O. J.*, Paul, R., DiMaggio, C., Delmelle, E., and Arif, A. A. (2022): Rural-Urban differences in EMS Response Time and Deaths at the crash scene, accepted for the Journal of Rural Health.
12. Paul, R., Adeyemi, O.*, and Arif, A. A. (2022): Estimating Mortality from Coal Workers’ Pneumoconiosis among Medicare beneficiaries using Binary Regressions for Spatially Sparse
    Data, American Journal of Industrial Medicine. DOI: 10.1002/ajim.23330
13. Miller, T.*, Paul, R., and Forthofer, M. (2022). Factors that Influence Time to Prosthesis Receipt after Lower Limb Amputation: A Cox Proportional Hazard Model Regression, to appear in PM&R Journal.
14. Racine, E.F., Schorno, R., Gholizadeh, S., Bably, M.B., Hatami, F., Stephens, C., Zadrozny, W., Schulkind, L., and Paul, R. (2022): A College Fast-Food Environment and Student Food and
    Beverage Choices: Developing an Integrated Database to Examine Food and Beverage Purchasing Choices among College Students, to appear in Nutrients.
15. Paul, R., Adeyemi, O.*, Ghosh, S.*, Pokhrel, K., and Arif, A. A. (2021): Dynamics of COVID-19 Mortality and Social Determinants of Health: A Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Exceedance
    Probabilities. Annals of Epidemiology, 62, 51-58. Special Issue on Spatial Analysis. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annepidem.2021.05.006
16. Adeyemi, O. J.*, Gill, T.*, Paul, R., and Huber, L. (2021), Evaluating the association of depression, functional limitation, and self-rated health on survival times among breast cancer
    patients, Plos ONE. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260481
17. Adeyemi, O. J.*, Paul, R., and Ahmed, A. A. (2021) An assessment of the impact of the rural- urban differences in the crash response time to crash fatal injury rates in the United States,
    Journal of Rural Health. https://doi.org/10.1111/jrh.12627
18. Bably, M.*, Paul, R., Laditka, S., and Racine E. F. (2021), Factors associated with initiation of added sugar among low-income young children participating in the Special Supplemental
    Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children in the US, Nutrients, 13, 3888. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu13113888
19. Adeyemi, O. J.*, Ahmed, A. A., and Paul, R. (2021) Exploring the Relationship of Rush Hour Period and Fatal and Non-Fatal Crash Injuries In the U.S.: A Systematic Review and Meta-
    Analysis, accepted for the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention.
20. Miller, T., Wurdeman, S., Paul, R., and Forthofer, M. (2021). The value of health economics and outcomes research in prosthetics and orthotics. Canadian Prosthetics & Orthotics Journal, 4(2). DOI: https://doi.org/10.33137/cpoj.v4i2.35959
21. Bably, M.*, Laditka, S., Paul, R., and Racine E. F. (2021), Age of Bottle Cessation and BMI-for-Age Percentile Among Children Aged 36 Months Participating in WIC, Childhood Obesity, DOI:
    10.1089/chi.2021.0119.
22. Wallace, L. A., Paul, R., Gholizadeh, S*., Zadrozny, W., Webster, C.*, Mayfield, M.*, and Racine, E. F. (2021). Neighborhood disadvantage and the sales of unhealthy products: alcohol, tobacco and unhealthy snack food. BMC Public Health, 21(1), 1-8.
23. Chen, S., Paul, R., Janies, D., Murphy, K.*, Feng, T., and Thill, J. C. (2021). Exploring Feasibility of Multivariate Deep Learning Models in Predicting COVID-19 Epidemic. Frontiers in public
    health, 9, 765.
24. Nurjannah, N.*, Curtis, A. B., Baker, K. M., and Paul, R. (2021). Mapping diabetes burden by school-district for school-based diabetes prevention interventions in selected cities in Michigan, USA. Geospatial Health, 16(1).
25. Y. Gu*, R. VanEnk, R. Paul, S. Peters, E. Dedoncker, G. Stoltman, and D. Prieto (2021). Accuracy of State-level Surveillance During Emerging Outbreaks of Respiratory Viruses: A
    Model-based Assessment, Medical Decision Making, 41(8), 1004–1016 https://doi.org/10.1177/0272989X211022276
26. Hendricks, B., Paul, R., Smith, C., Wen, S., Kimble, W., Amjad, A., Atkins, A., and Hodder, S. (2021), Coronavirus Testing Disparities Associated with Community Level Deprivation, Racial
    Inequalities, and Food Insecurity in West Virginia, Annals of Epidemiology, 59, 44-49.
27. Revens, K. E.*, Gutierrez, D., Paul, R., Reynolds, A. D., Price, R., and DeHaven, M. J. (2021). Social Support and Religiosity as Contributing Factors to Resilience and Mental Wellbeing in Latino Immigrants: A Community-Based Participatory Research Study. Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, 1-13.
28. Paul, R., Arif, A., Pokhrel, K.*, and Ghosh, S.* (2021). The association of social determinants of health with COVID‐19 mortality in rural and urban counties. The Journal of Rural Health, 37(2), 278-286.
29. Owusu, C.*, Silverman, G. S., Vinson, D. S., Paul, R., Baker, K. M., and Delmelle, E. M. (2020). Predicting coliform presence in private wells as a function of well characteristics, parcel size and leachfield soil rating. Science of The Total Environment, 143701. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.143701
30. Paul, R., Arif, A. A., Adeyemi, O.*, Ghosh, S.*, and Han, D. (2020). Progression of COVID‐19 from urban to rural areas in the United States: a spatiotemporal analysis of prevalence rates. The Journal of Rural Health, 36(4), 591-601. doi: 10.1111/jrh.12486 [Received Article of the Year Award by the National Rural Health Association and the Journal of Rural Health]
31. Miller, T. A.*, Paul, R., Forthofer, M., and Wurdeman, S. R. (2020). The Role of Earlier Receipt of a Lower Limb Prosthesis on Emergency Department Utilization., The journal of physical medicine and rehabilitation (PM&R), 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1002/pmrj.12504
32. Owusu, C.*, Silverman, G. S., Vinson, D. S., Bobyarchick, A., Paul, R., and Delmelle, E. (2020). A spatial autologistic model to predict the presence of arsenic in private wells across Gaston
    County, North Carolina using geology, well depth, and pH. Exposure and Health, 1-12. doi: 10.1007/s12403-020-00373-6
33. Kennedy, S. C., Mennicke, A., and Paul, R. (2020). Childhood Polyvictimization and Mental Health Issues among Incarcerated Women. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 1-18.
34. Desjardins, M. R.*, Eastin, M. D., Paul, R., Casas, I., and Delmelle, E. M. (2020). Space–Time Conditional Autoregressive Modeling to Estimate Neighborhood-Level Risks for Dengue Fever in Cali, Colombia. The American journal of tropical medicine and hygiene, 103(5), 2040-2053.
35. Hudak, K. M.*, Paul, R., Gholizadeh, S*., Zadrozny, W., and Racine, E. F. (2020). Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) authorization of discount
    variety stores: leveraging the private sector to modestly increase availability of healthy foods. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 111(6), 1278-1285.
36. Miller, T. A.*, Paul, R., Forthofer, M., and Wurdeman, S. R. (2020). Impact of time to receipt of prosthesis on total healthcare costs 12 Months Postamputation. American journal of physical medicine & rehabilitation, 99(11), 1026.
37. Arif, A. A., Paul, R., Delmelle, E., Owusu, C., and Adeyemi, O. (2020). Estimating the prevalence and spatial clusters of coal workers’ pneumoconiosis cases using medicare claims data, 2011‐2014. American journal of industrial medicine, 63(6), 478-483.
38. Platonova, E. A., Warren-Findlow, J., and Paul, R. (2020). The Relationship between Patient-Centered Medical Home Characteristics and Patient Dissatisfaction at a Federally Qualified
    Health Center. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 31(3), 1364-1378.
39. Jelsema, C. M.*, Paul, R., and McKean, J. W. (2020): Robust Estimation of Reduced Rank Models to Large Spatial Datasets, REVSTAT–Statistical Journal, 18(2), 203-221.
40. MacQuillan, E.*, Curtis, A., Baker, K., and Paul, R. (2019). Geospatial Analysis of Birth Records to Target Programming for Mothers With Gestational Diabetes Mellitus in Michigan, 2013. Public Health Reports, 134(1), 27-35.
41. Owusu, C.*, Baker, K. M., Paul, R., and Curtis, A. B. (2018). Modelling individual vulnerability to sexually transmitted infections to optimise intervention strategies: analysis of surveillance data from Kalamazoo County, Michigan, USA. Sex Transm Infect, sextrans-2017.
42. Paul, R., Lim, C. Y., Curtis, A. B., Maiti, T., Baker, K. M., Mantilla, L. B.*, and MacQuillan, E. L.* (2018). Assessing the association of diabetes self-management education centers with age-
    adjusted diabetes rates across US: Aspatial cluster analysis approach. Spatial and spatio- temporal epidemiology, 24, 53-62.
43. Herbei, R., Paul, R., and Berliner, L. M. (2017). Applying diffusion-based Markov chain Monte Carlo. PloS one, 12(3), e0173453.
44. MacQuillan, E.*, Curtis, A. B., Baker, K., and Paul, R., Back, Y. (2016) Using GIS Mapping to Target Public Health Interventions: Examining Birth Outcomes Across GIS Techniques, Journal of
    community health, 42(4), 633-638.
45. Kothari, C.L.*, Paul, R., Dormitorio, B.*, Ospina, F., James, A., Lenz, D., Baker, K., Curtis, A. and Wiley, J., 2016. The interplay of race, socioeconomic status and neighborhood residence upon birth outcomes in a high black infant mortality community. SSM-population health, 2, 859-867.
46. Day, A., Curtis, A., Paul, R., Allotey, P. A.*, and Crosby, S. (2016). Timely health service utilization of older foster youth by insurance type. Journal of Adolescent Health, 58(1), 17-23.
47. Jelsema, C. M.* and Paul, R. (2013), Spatial Mixed Effects Model for Compositional Data with Application to Coal Geology. International Journal of Coal Geology, 114, pp. 33–43.
48. Shoemaker, M. J.*, Curtis, A. B., Paul, R., Dickinson, M. G., and Polso, A., and Sinha, K. (2013), Longitudinal daily activity patterns in individuals with chronic heart failure: derivation and
    association with prognosis and clinical characteristics, Cardiopulmonary Physical Therapy Journal, 24:4, pp. 25–33.
49. Curtis, A.B., Kothari, C., Paul, R. and Connors, E. (2013) Using GIS and secondary data to target diabetes-related public health efforts. Public Health Reports, 128(3), 212-220.
50. Shoemaker, M.J.*, Curtis, A.B., Vangsnes, E., Dickinson, M.G. and Paul, R. (2012) Analysis of daily activity data from implanted devices: relationship to mortality/life expectancy and the anchor-based minimum clinically important difference. The World Journal of Cardiovascular Diseases, 3, pp. 129–135.
51. Paul, R., MacEachern, S. N., and Berliner, L. M. (2012), Assessing Mixing and Convergence of MCMC via Stratification, Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 21:3, 693–712.
52. Paul, R. and Cressie, N. (2011), Lognormal Block Kriging for Contaminated Soil, European Journal of Soil Sciences, 62(3), 337–345.
53. Craigmile, P.F., Calder, C.A., Li, H., Paul, R., and Cressie, N. (2009), Hierarchical Model Building, Fitting, and Checking: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Bayesian Analysis of Arsenic
    Exposure Pathways, Bayesian Analysis, 4 (1), 1–35 (with Discussion 37–62).
54. Santner, T. J., Craigmile, P. F., Calder, C. A., and Paul, R. (2008), Demographic and Behavioral Modifiers of Arsenic Exposure Pathways: A Bayesian Hierarchical Analysis of NHEXAS Data,
    Environ. Sci. Technol., 42(15), 5607–5614. [This article ranked one in the top 20 articles published in this area as of Nov. 2012)].

Peer-reviewed Book Chapters

1. Paul, R., Jelsema, C. M.*, and Lau, R. (2015) A Flexible Class of Reduced Rank Spatial Models for Large Non-Gaussian Dataset, Peer reviewed book chapter on “Current Trends in Bayesian Methodology with Applications” edited jointly by Satyanshu K. Upadhyay, Umesh Singh, Dipak K. Dey, and Appaia Loganathan, published by Chapman and Hall/CRC Press, pp. 477–502.
2. Agarwal, R., Cai, C*, Gupta, A., Paul, R., and Salih, R.* (2011), BANBAD: A Centralized Anomaly Detection Technique for Ad Hoc Networks, Peer Reviewed Book Chapter, Network, Security, Administration and Management Advancing Technologies and Practices, edited by Dr. Dulal C. Kar and Dr. Mahbubur Rahman Syed, IGI Global.

Peer-reviewed Conference Publication

1. Cai, C.*, Gupta, A., & Paul, R., (2009) BANBAD – A Centralized Belief-Networks-Based Anomaly Detection Algorithm for MANETs. In GLOBECOM 2009-2009 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (pp. 1-6). IEEE.

Other Publications

1. Arif, A. A., Owusu, C., Paul, R., Blanchette, C. M., Patel, R. P., & Borders, T. F. (2021). Spatial Analysis of Health Care Utilization among Medicare Beneficiaries with Coal Workers’ Pneumoconiosis and Other Related Pneumoconiosis. Policy Brief. Rural & Underserved Health Research Center Publications. 17. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/ruhrc_reports/1
2. Shea, K. et al. (2020). COVID-19 reopening strategies at the county level in the face of uncertainty: Multiple Models for Outbreak Decision Support. medRxiv. doi: 10.1101/2020.11.03.20225409
3. Paul, R., Cressie, N., Buxton, B. E., Calder, C. A., Craigmile, P. F., Li, H., McMillan, N. J., Morara, M., Sanford, J., Santner, T. J., and Zhang J. (2007), A Bayesian Hierarchical Pathways Model of Arsenic Exposure based on NHEXAS data: A comparison of US EPA Region 5 and Arizona, Proceedings of the 2007 Joint Statistical Meetings, 1055–1062 (not peer reviewed).

* Indicates student author