Our Team

About

Kristin Kostka, a computational epidemiologist, leads the development and scale of the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) Center. She holds a BS in exercise science from Elon University and an MPH in epidemiology from the Boston University School of Public Health. Currently, she is working on her DPhil part time at the Centre for Statistics in Medicine at the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology, and Musculoskeletal Sciences Medical Sciences Division. 

For more than a decade, Kostka has led real-world evidence generation studies, designing and implementing enterprise patient data lakes, conducting large-scale multinational clinical trials, and preparing regulatory submissions in preparation for filing applications to have therapies reviewed and authorized for use by the FDA and other regulatory bodies. A pre-eminent voice in observational health research and data science, she lends her expertise to research teams across the U.S., Europe, Middle East, and Asia. 

Kostka co-authored three chapters for The Book of OHDSI, which is the world’s first observational health open science textbook, and she was a facilitator for the initial OHDSI COVID-19 Study-a-thon. When COVID hit, she led a team of 23 data partners from eight countries running follow-on research programs, including Project CHARYBDIS (Characterizing Health Associated Risks and Your Baseline Disease in SARS-COV-2). 

Kostka’s many industry awards include a 2020 Elon University Young Alumni Council “Top 10 Under 10” Alumni Award and a 2018 OHDSI Titan Award for Community Collaboration. She is a three-time recipient of the Deloitte Outstanding Performance Award and has been recognized eight times with the Deloitte Applause Award for exceptional client service as a real-world evidence subject matter expert. 

Currently her research focuses on the heterogeneity of clinical practice patterns via large-scale characterization frameworks. She works closely with the National Institutes of Health on the centralized data repository for COVID-19 surveillance, the National COVID Cohort Collaborative. She also leads Northeastern’s involvement in the CBER BEST Seminar Series of webinars, which disseminates research relevant to the ongoing surveillance of CBER-regulated vaccines. 

At the OHDSI Center, Kostka wears many hats. In addition to leading educational program development and cross-institutional research collaborations to advance open networks, she co-leads the OHDSI Education Working Group and oversees Book of OHDSI updates. 

Ask her about:

• how to collaborate with OHDSI and the Roux Institute
• writing grants
• educational programs for RWE
• deep phenotyping for long COVID
• data ingestion and harmonization
• how to run an OHDSI study