Paula Strassle
Assistant Professor, Epidemiology
pdstrass@umd.edu3114F Biomolecular Sciences Building
Dr. Paula Strassle is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Maryland. Her work focuses on identifying neighborhood, healthcare system, and individual barriers to high-quality, appropriate care for racial and ethnic minority populations and rural communities. Her current work focuses on addressing disparities across the cancer care continuum.
Dr. Strassle specializes in leveraging high-dimensional healthcare data, data linkage, and advanced epidemiologic methods to conduct population health research that can inform clinical practice and reduce health disparities in marginalized populations. She is also interested in exploring the impact of bias in observational research and making complex epidemiologic methods accessible to junior researchers and clinical audiences.
For more details, please visit the DisaggrEgating the Causes Of Disparities in hEalthcare (DECODE) lab website. Website link
Dr. Strassle holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Practice, Sciences and Health Outcomes Research (P-SHOR) in the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy. She is also a member of the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland (AIM) and the University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenbaum Comprehensive Cancer Center (UMGCCC, Population Science program).
Department Information
- Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics
Healthcare utilization and outcomes; Health disparities; Social determinants of health; cancer screening and treatment; causal inference; healthcare data
Doris Sands Excellence in Teaching Award (early career), 2026
MPower Early Scholars Investment Fund, 2026
AIM-AHEAD Bridge2AI for Clinical Care Training Program, 2025
NIH Director’s Award – Emerging Leader, 2023
NIMHD William G. Coleman Minority Health and Health Disparities Research Innovation Award, 2022
NIMHD Merit Award for Scientific Innovation, 2021
William Rutala scholarship, Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of American, 2019
Travel scholarship, International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology, 2017, 2019
EPIB610: Foundations of Epidemiology (Summer)
EPIB684: Epidemiologic Research Using Healthcare Data
EPIB685: Causal Inference in Epidemiology
PhD, Epidemiology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
MSPH, Epidemiology, Emory University
BS, Psychology, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Strassle PD, Minc SD, Kalbaugh CA, Donneyong MM, Ko JS, McGinigle KL (2025). Disaggregating health differences and health disparities with machine learning and observed-to-expected ratios: Application to major lower limb amputation. Epidemiol, 36(6), 841-848. Article link
Ko JS, El-Toukhy S, Quintero SM, Wilkerson MJ, Nápoles AM, Stewart AL, Strassle PD. (2023). Disparities in telehealth access, not willingness to use services, likely explain rural telehealth disparities. J Rural Health, 39(3), 617-624. Article link
- 2023 top cited article in Journal of Rural Health
Duchesneau ED, Jackson BE, Webster-Clark M, Lund JL, Reeder-Hayes KE, Nápoles AM, Strassle PD. (2022). The timing, the treatment, the question: Comparison of epidemiologic approaches to minimize immortal time bias in real-world data using a surgical oncology example. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev, 31(11), 2079-2086. Article link
Strassle PD, Stewart AL, Quintero SM, Bonilla J, Alhomsi A, Santana-Ufret V, Maldonado AI, Forde AT, Nápoles AM. (2022). COVID-19-related discrimination among racial/ethnic minorities and other marginalized communities in the United States. Am J Public Health, 112(3), 453-466. Article link
Google scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=0Wa5U-gAAAAJ&view_op=list_works