Sison, Olivia T.

Olivia Sison is a Research Assistant Professor at the Institute of Clinical Epidemiology, National Institutes of Health, University of the Philippines Manila. She also serves as a Clinical Assistant Professor at the Department of Clinical Epidemiology, UP College of Medicine. She received her ScM Epidemiology degree from Brown University School of Public Health. She also holds a Master of Science in Public Health (Biostatistics) from the University of the Philippines Manila. She has more than 15 years of experience leading and coordinating public health research investigations and in data management and analysis in several nationwide projects in the Philippines. She was selected as a trainee of Brown’s Fogarty HIV International Training Program where she received advanced training at Brown University School of Public Health in complex and applied epidemiological methods, with specific emphasis on HIV prevention-care and research involving sexual and gender minority communities. As a research faculty member at UPM, she trained and led the team of data management staff in conducting data quality assurance activities. She conducted field monitoring visits nationwide for complex public health programs and have led the troubleshooting of data quality problems while survey teams are implementing fieldwork and research protocols. In 2016, she was the Assistant Head of the Data Management Unit of the 2016 National Tuberculosis Prevalence Survey (NTPS) funded by the Philippines Department of Health (DOH), a large nationwide public health investigation involving more than 46,000 participants. She co-authored the final report of this survey, specifically focusing on the methodological, data analytic, and other technical components of this national policy report. As a UPM faculty member, she was involved in campus wide UPM training and research initiatives, including providing biostatistical consultations and analysis of research projects for fellows, residents, and researchers from various training hospitals and universities in the Philippines. She is also a co-investigator of a multi-country community-engaged cohort study entitled “LIFE course study in CARdiovascular disease Epidemiology (LIFECARE)”. LIFECARE is a community-based prospective cohort study to determine the effects of socioeconomic factors, psychosocial stress, and lifestyle factors in the development of cardiovascular disease in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand.