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Senior’s Name: Ilona Fridman
Availability: 3/3

Pairing - Junior
Title: Ilona Fridman Ph.D. Fellow in CCQTP Program in Lineberger
Institution: University of North Carolina
Discipline: Communication studies
Years of experience: 12

Research

Areas of work:
  • Message design
  • Patient–provider relationship
Research methods:
  • Co-design
  • Observational studies
  • Natural text processing
Keywords describing expertise and interest:
  1. patient-provider communication
  2. digital health communication, misinformation
Field of expertise, major interests, and consultation topics:

Dr. Ilona Fridman studies health communication to empower informed decisions and enable high-quality equitable patient care. She finds solutions to public health problems by designing interventions that improve communication between patients and providers. With an educational background in engineering and a Ph.D. from Columbia University, Dr. Fridman possesses a unique blend of quantitative skills for data analysis and theoretical knowledge that allows her to build a strong research portfolio. This portfolio includes designing interventions to improve communication for patients with advanced cancer, as well as patients with early prostate and breast cancers. Her most recent work focuses on digital health communications and misinformation. She has over 20 publications. Her work has been accepted by high-impact journals, including JAMA Oncology, JAMA Pediatrics, Health Psychology, JMIR Public Health, and Surveillance. She has received funding from both internal and external agencies, including the T32 Cancer Care Quality Training Program (NIH, 2021-2023), the DukeDataPlus Program (2018), and the UNC NC TraCS pilot research award (2022).

She has provided mentorship to over fifteen students pursuing advanced degrees or studying at the undergraduate level. She has also honed her teaching skills by working with MBA students at Columbia Business School and leading the class of graduate students in the Applied Data Science Capstone Project at Duke. Before pursuing her Ph.D., she worked in public relations for a multinational corporation and was a co-founder of an IT startup that developed digital solutions to support communication tools for industry customers.

Biography/CV: Read CV