Hometown: Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Faculty mentor: Hyunkeun (Ryan) Cho, PhD, associate professor, Department of Biostatistics, College of Public Health
Degree program and anticipated graduation date: PhD in biostatistics, Dec 2024

David-Erick Lafontant leverages artificial intelligence and advanced math to improve medical research studies by reducing errors in data, identifying dosing patterns, and helping researchers understand how medication treatment plans affect patient health. Currently, he is applying this approach to observational studies of patients with Parkinson’s disease to evaluate which treatment patterns improve their symptoms. Lafontant’s research can provide insight to how diseases like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s progress, especially when the stages of the disease are unclear. By improving how they identify and track the stages of these diseases, researchers and health care providers can make clinical trials more successful and offer more precise treatment to patients.

After graduating, Lafontant will continue to work in clinical trials and biomedical studies, using his skills in statistical analysis and machine learning to advance new treatments and improve patient outcomes.

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