Assistant Professor
Biography
Kristina Kintziger, PhD, MPH is an environmental and infectious disease epidemiologist with experience in academia and public health practice. Dr. Kintziger received her MPH degree in Epidemiology from the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University and her PhD in Epidemiology from the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina. During her MPH program, she worked as a research assistant in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and completed a master’s thesis related to the impacts of immune alterations on the development of schizophrenia. During her doctoral program, she worked as a graduate research assistant in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics on projects related to obesity and diabetes in South Carolina. She also worked at the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control in the STD/HIV Surveillance Division. Her doctoral dissertation examined risk-based vs. routine HIV testing outcomes in rural and urban residents of South Carolina. Her post-doctoral training was through the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists Applied Epidemiology Fellowship, where she completed an infectious disease-focused fellowship at the Florida Department of Health. Prior to joining UT faculty, she served as the epidemiologist/biostatistician for the Building Resilience Against Climate Effects (BRACE) and Environmental Public Health Tracking (EPHT) programs at the Florida Department of Health, and served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at Augusta University (formerly the Medical College of Georgia).
Research
Dr. Kintziger’s research interests are focused in environmental health, in general, and the application of novel and advanced epidemiologic methods to understanding the impacts of the environment on health. More specifically, her current focus is on understanding the vulnerabilities and the current and future disease burden associated with climate-sensitive hazards, as well as understanding the relationship between morbidity/mortality and social determinants of health.
Education
- BA (Philosophy) - Emory University, Atlanta, GA - 2001
- MPH (Epidemiology) - Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, GA - 2003
- PhD (Epidemiology) - Arnold School of Public Health, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC - 2008
Professional Service
Dr. Kintziger co-facilitates a national Community of Practice focused on developing and sharing methods for quantifying associations between climate hazards and health outcomes and incorporating these associations into disease burden projections and implementing climate-related adaptation and intervention projects. She is a member of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists and the American Meteorological Society, and she has served as a reviewer for journals such as the Journal of Rural Health, Public Health Reports, and the International Journal of Biometeorology.