Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Dr. Gundersen is a senior research scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and the Survey and Qualitative Methods Core at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He is also an associate member of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center's Cancer Care Delivery Research Program.

Dr. Gundersen's research is devoted to developing and evaluation new measurement approaches for population health research. His work has focused on finding efficient ways to sample hard-to-reach populations such as young adults, and understanding the challenges and opportunities of using mobile technology for collecting self-reported health data. The long-term goal of this line of research is to combine mobile technology for rapid data collection with statistical modeling that uses prior information of health trends to generate reliable estimates for rapid surveillance of self-reported population health. This is especially crucial in the current era marked by considerable threats to the viability of current methodologies due to low response rate and rapidly increasingly resources needed for data collection. Dr. Gundersen also works to develop measurement approaches for large scale studies that typically puts a great data collection burden on patients, clinicians, and administrators, all of whom are already taxed by managing their disease, caregiving, and/or professional responsibilities. The goal of this work is broadly to reduce the data collection burden on patients (or health centers or other members of the target population) through evaluating existing and new measures using item response theory approaches.

• Measurement, Patient Reported Outcomes
• Item response theory
• Psychometrics
• Survey Methodology
• Surveillance, Population