Kelly O’Shea is a Chicago-based epidemiologist and evaluation specialist with research interests in endometriosis, program evaluation, and mental health. She holds a Masters of Public Health and is an epidemiology PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is the Associate Director of Evaluation and Tracking at the Center for Clinical and Translational Research at UIC.
I’m currently available for consulting and media.
Besides being a researcher, Kelly is a competitive and performing aerialist, a good cook, and a middling baker. She is also a voratious reader and a lover of trash reality shows. She can be found with her husband and cats in their home outside Chicago.
Kelly has worked in the healthcare industry utilizing Medicaid data, clinical research, municipal public health, and academia and has strong relationships both throughout Chicago and nationally. While now an epidemiologist, she brings the heart of a social scientist to everything she does and seeks to place all her research in a social context due to her background in anthropology.
Endometriosis
Kelly's dissertation focuses on the association between lesion location, symptomology, treatment outcomes, and cardiovascular disease. She feels deeply linked to this disease due to her own experiences with it.
Program Evaluation
Kelly believes that the knowing if something is working and if it is sustainable is an important aspect of research. As an employee of the CCTS she wants to help cut the nearly 17 year gap from bench to bedside that currently exists by utilizing and refining what is currently in the literature.
Mental Health
Prior to working at the CCTS, Kelly worked in perinatal psychiatry clinical research at Northwestern University. She worked closely with patients and developed an appreciation for the need for compassionate care which addresses the whole of the pregnant person.
She has presented research findings at the American Evaluation Association, Lewis Landsberg Research Day, and the Perinatal Mental Health Conference. She is a member of the American Public Health Association, Society for Pediatric and Perinatal Epidemiological Research, the Endometriosis Association, and the American Evaluation Association. She has also appeared on podcasts including Public Health Epidemiology Careers and written guest blogs for the Limit DNE.
Black Lives Matter, Trans Lives Matter, Science is Political