Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies

Data Core

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Data Core

The Data Core provides data-collection, management, and analytic support on over 30 current research projects based at CAAS, the School of Public Health, and with Brown affiliated faculty across the country.

The CAAS Data Core has been in continuous operation since 2001. The Data Core provides data-collection, management, and analytic support on over 30 current research projects based at CAAS, the School of Public Health, and with Brown affiliated faculty across the country (e.g., American University, University of Rhode Island, Northwestern). These core staffing relationships are often long-standing and are funded through budgeted FTE.

Specific support functions include:

design and implementation of study data systems and tracking
data summarization and advanced programming
data merging and formatting of analysis-level datasets

The Data Core has worked on over 100 NIH-funded grants, including projects such as the Alcohol Research Center on HIV (ARCH) and the Center for Addiction and Disease Risk Exacerbation (CADRE), a federally funded NIH Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE).

Contact and procedures

Individuals and teams interested in working with the CAAS Data Core should contact Suzanne Sales, Senior Data Scientist.

The purpose of these meetings is to describe project scope and requested data support while the team offers methodological guidance and budget FTE estimates. Services are strengthened via long-term relationships across an investigator’s or team’s research program, but both short and long-term data needs are accommodated by the core.

Request a meeting

The Data Core Team

Leadership

Molly Magill, Ph.D.

Director of Biostatistics, Professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences

molly_magill@brown.edu

Research Profile

Dr. Magill has served as the Director of the CAAS Biostatistical Core since 2011, providing strategic and scientific leadership for all biostatistical activities within the core. In this role, Dr. Magill oversees the operations and personnel of the core and provides expert consultation and mentorship to CAAS faculty, fellows, and trainees. She also serves as a biostatistical Co-Investigator on multiple federally funded projects, contributing to study design, data analysis, and dissemination of research findings.

The Data Core Team

Suzanne Sales

Senior Data Scientist

suzanne_sales@brown.edu

Suzanne Sales has been a Data Core member since 2001. She manages effort allocation for Data Core staff members across multiple projects and consults with prospective users of the Data Core to estimate service needs. She has experience programming Qualtrics and Optical Character Recognition software (Teleform). She manages several large datasets and completes data summarization using SPSS for various clinical trials data as well as data from several SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) subwards. She brings extensive experience programming data collection tools such as SurveyToGo (Dooblo) for work on federally-funded international studies conducting research in South Africa and several other studies in South America.
Timothy Souza

Senior Data Scientist

timothy_souza@brown.edu

Tim Souza has been a CAAS Data Core member since 2003. Tim has a Masters’s in Data Science, with extensive experience in SPSS, SAS, R, VBA/VB.Net, Qualtrics, REDCap, Teleform, and Filemaker programming. Interests include working with international, multi-site, and remote data collection, study setup design and monitoring, customized subject tracking databases, condition randomization, Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) data analysis, wearable biosensor-related datasets, processing macros, and data summarization. Tim has managed data collection and programming on many diverse studies including, multi-site implementation science studies, remote data collection studies in South Africa, dyad, cohort, and multi-burst studies. Tim also has extensive experience managing large studies with multiple data sources, including longitudinal survey data, EMA, biosensor, and EMR/clinical lab data.
Michelle Loxley

Senior Data Analyst

michelle_loxley@brown.edu

Michelle Loxley is a highly skilled programmer, database manager, and data analyst supporting public health research studies at Brown and affiliated institutions since 2005. She provides full-lifecycle support for numerous complex longitudinal research studies, managing projects from initial data collection through analysis. Michelle's core strengths lie in designing and programming robust survey and EMA data collection systems (using tools including Qualtrics, REDCap, SurveyToGo, and MetricWire), developing custom participant tracking systems, and creating engaging, data-driven personalized normative feedback mechanisms for study participants. Her technical fluency spans database design (SQL Server, FileMaker, MS Access), application programming (C#, ASP.NET, Python, JavaScript), statistical software (SAS, SPSS, R), and data visualization and reporting (Tableau, Cognos), as well as integrating systems using REST API scripting and SDKs to ensure seamless data flow and research integrity.
Jennifer Schmidlin

IT Data Analyst

jennifer_schmidlin@brown.edu

Jennifer Schmidlin began working at CAAS in 1997 in various positions over the years, including Research Assistant, Project Coordinator, and Data Manager, and has been a member of the Data Core since 2010. Jennifer has extensive experience with project start-up and programming data collection tools using platforms such as Teleform and Qualtrics. She is skilled in managing multiple large datasets, data merging of complex datasets coming from multiple sources (such as Qualtrics, REDCap, and Excel), and data summarization using SPSS.
Rebeccah Rodriguez

Data Analyst

rebeccah_rodriguez@brown.edu

Rebeccah Rodriguez has been a Data Core member since 2022, relocating from New Mexico where she earned a Master’s in Public Health (UNM) with a concentration in Epidemiology. Rebeccah brings experience working on many public health grants and programs in various roles, from field and laboratory research technician, focus groups, community-based participatory research, grant writing, program evaluation, acupuncture research, acudetox, infectious disease surveillance, data analysis, and conference dissemination. Rebeccah currently provides support to the CADRE grant project investigators and staff with programming in Qualtrics & Teleform, data management, and project implementation.