Student Spotlight: Casey Cazer
January 7, 2019
Casey Cazer is a doctoral student in biomedical and biological sciences from Canandaigua, New York. After earning her undergraduate degree at Harvard University, she chose to pursue research in population medicine and epidemiology at Cornell.
What is your area of research and why is it important?
I research antibiotic resistant bacteria in humans and animals with an emphasis on bacteria that are resistant to multiple drugs. Resistant bacteria cause over 700,000 deaths worldwide per year and this is predicted to increase to 10 million deaths by 2050. My current research uses association rule mining, a machine learning technique, to study trends in antibiotic resistance. For example, we recently showed that E. coli from U.S. chickens and chicken meat had consistent multiple-drug resistances from 2004 to 2012. Currently I am applying this technique to resistant infections in dogs and humans in order to improve monitoring of antibiotic resistance in hospitals.