Student Profiles

Alaina graduated from the College of William and Mary with a BS in Neuroscience and Public Health. As an undergraduate, she participated in the Amgen Scholars Program at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where she studied the life course epidemiology of disorders identified through the newborn heel prick test.

She then worked as a postbaccalaureate fellow at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) under the supervision of Dr. Robert Hoover, gaining experience in study management through the development of the Connect for Cancer Prevention cohort.

Alaina earned an MS in Epidemiology and Biostatistics from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. As a graduate research assistant with Dr. Lorelei Mucci, she investigated quality-of-life outcomes and sleep among prostate cancer survivors in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study.

She is now pursuing a DPhil at the University of Oxford and the National Cancer Institute. Her research focuses on physical activity and chronic disease prevention, leveraging wearable data from large population cohorts. She is co-supervised by Professor Aiden Doherty (Oxford Population Health), Professor Ruth Travis (Oxford Cancer Epidemiology Unit), Dr. Adam Lewandowski (Oxford Population Health), and Dr. Charles Matthews (NCI Metabolic Epidemiology Branch).