Anna Kahkoska, MD, PhD

Assistant Professor, Department of Nutrition
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

​Anna Kahkoska is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nutrition and a scholar in the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute Gene Orringer Junior Faculty Career Development (KL2) Program. Her main research interest is developing precision medicine approaches to improve the daily lives of people who live with diabetes, focusing on the complex needs of pediatric and geriatric populations. A key aspect of her research involves engaging older adults living with diabetes and their caregivers as stakeholders to ground the research in lived experiences. She also enjoys collaborating with and learning from colleagues in clinical medicine (e.g., geriatrics and endocrinology) and biostatistics. Anna previously graduated from the MD/PhD Program at UNC in 2021.

---

Workshop: Introduction to Precision Medicine: From Statistics to Society
October 26, 2022; 10:00am - 11:00am

Precision medicine aims to learn from data how to match the right treatment to the right person at the right time. One common goal in precision medicine is the estimation of optimal dynamic treatment regimes (DTRs), sequences of decision rules that recommend treatments to patients in a way that, if followed, would optimize outcomes for each individual and overall in the targeted population. In this presentation, we will describe how the precision medicine framework formalizes sequential clinical decision-making and briefly review a subset of most popular strategies for learning optimal dynamic treatment regimes. We will then invite the workshop group to ideate and discuss the critical opportunities and challenges for the translation of DTRs to clinical and community care, the role for stakeholder engagement and cross-disciplinary collaboration, and considerations for evaluating DTRs in practice. ​

---

Back to Workshop Instructors