Department of Community Health and Epidemiology

Faculty of Medicine

Swarna Weerasinghe, PhD

Associate Professor

SW_CommunityHealth
Department of Community Health and Epidemiology

Email: swarna.weerasinghe@dal.ca
Phone: 902-494-1753
Mailing Address: 
Centre for Clinical Research, Room 417, 5790 University Ave, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 1V7
 
Research Topics:
  • Big data analytics and digital health applications in epidemiology
  • Health outcomes and healthcare accessibility of vulnerable populations: immigrants, drug users, homeless and female sex workers
  • Global health: Mental and physical health of vulnerable females
  • Time trend analysis of emergency department visits
  • Machine learning and statistical learning applications in big data in health

Education

  • PhD (Dalhousie University)
  • MSc (University of Colombo)
  • BSc (University of Colombo)

Affiliations

Research interests

Dr. Weerasinghe pursue research in statistical learning and machine learning applications to health and access to healthcare for vulnerable populations. She has developed new statistical methods and methodological frameworks to analyze complex health data. She has partnered with clinicians, computer scientists and global public health researchers in examining time trends and demographic patterns in access to healthcare across population subgroups. 

Selected publications

Weerasinghe S S, Campbell S G (February 08, 2021) Identifying Acuity Level-Based Adult Emergency Department Use Time Trends Across Demographic Characteristics. Cureus 13(2): e13225. DOI 10.7759/cureus.13225

Weerasinghe, S. (2020). Occupational health and safety standards of foreign seasonal farm workers: evaluation of personal protection measures, policies and practices. In Occupational Health. Kavirathene P (Eds), IntechOpen ltd, London, UK.  https://www.intechopen.com/online-first/occupational-health-and-safety-standards-of-foreignseasonal-farm-workers-evaluation-of-personal-pro.

Weerasinghe, S (2021). Culturally sensitive end of life care decision making, during a pandemic: Shared decision making using electronic tools, Invited  presentation, ICA annual meeting (virtual), May 27, 2021.

Weerasinghe, S. (2017) Statistical modeling of complex health outcomes and air pollution data: Application of air quality health indexing for asthma risk assessment, Journal Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Public Health, 14(1): e12092-1:  e12092-13.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2427/12092

Weerasinghe, S (2013) Analytical frameworks of social network analysis, in Network Biology, Theories, Methods and Applications, WJ ZHANG (Eds)Nova Science Publishers, Inc. New York, USA pp. 1:25. 

Jelodar, H, Orji R., Matwin S., Weerasinghe S., Oyebode O. and Wang Y., Artificial Intelligence for Emotion-Semantic Trending and People Emotion Detection During COVID-19 Social Isolation, Under review JIMR, April, 2021.  

Weerasinghe S., (2021) Framework for Online health social network communication Assessment of Adherence to clinical guidelines for self-management: Application to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, submitted to Informatics for Health and Social Care, June 2021.

Wills, B, Purttu E, Fitzjerald, E, Weerasinghe S, Thompson H & Macias K W., (2021), Causes of Mortality among Female Sex Workers: A multi–Country Study, Submitted to Lancet, June 2021.

Teaching

  • Biostatistical Modelling CHE6019 (module 2) 2015-2021
  • Introduction to Health data Science: Applied Machine Learning and Statistical Learning in Epidemiology. 2021