Division Announcements

Welcome faculty member Anne Mobley Butler, PhD, MS

Anne Mobley Butler, PhD, MS, Instructor in Medicine

Anne grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, where she once aspired to be a baseball statistician for the Baltimore Orioles. After earning her BS degree in Neuroscience at Emory University (2003) and her MS degree in Epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health (2006), she worked as a research coordinator in the Infectious Diseases Division at Washington University School of Medicine (2006-2009). Here, she collaborated with ID faculty on research studies using hospital informatics data and electronic medical records to determine disease burden, risk factors, outcomes, costs, and electronic surveillance methods for hospital-acquired infections and antimicrobial resistance.

In 2009, she moved back to the east coast for doctoral and post-doctoral training in epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During her training, she focused on the application of epidemiologic study designs and analytic methods, including comparative effectiveness research methodology, to highly detailed, clinical and administrative data that are captured on patients as part of routine clinical care. Her doctoral work focused on using large healthcare utilization databases to study disease-related burden, prevention, treatment, and outcomes in immunosuppressed populations (i.e., end-stage renal disease patients and cancer patients). During her postdoctoral fellowship in pharmacoepidemiology, Anne became increasingly interested in the prevention-related substantive area of vaccine. She used data from US commercial claims, Medicaid, and the United States Renal Database System (USRDS) to investigate the utilization, effectiveness, and safety of several vaccines in various populations (i.e., Tdap immunization during pregnancy; rotavirus immunization during childhood; HPV immunization during adolescence; and high-dose influenza immunization in the dialysis population). Much of her work is motivated by the ability to use large-scale non-experimental studies and existing healthcare data to study vulnerable populations who are rarely included in clinical trials and for whom little is known regarding the risks and benefits of commonly used vaccines and drugs.

Anne was delighted to return to St. Louis and to join the faculty in the Infectious Diseases Division in May. She lives in University City with her husband and two children. She spends most of her free time watching her boys wrestle and sword-fight. She also loves to read, travel, run, bike, enjoy live music, and eat delicious food.