The Missing US

The Missing US Project is more than a research lab. It is a collaborative project that includes researchers, policymakers, and community members with a shared goal: to improve our understanding of and responses to established and emerging epidemics among vulnerable and marginalized populations. The idea for this project is predicated on the notion that there are overlooked populations and hidden structural risk factors for diseases such as substance use disorders and HIV that limit our ability to end these epidemics. Fundamentally, we believe that we cannot reach people we do not know exist and are at risk. The Missing US is a collaborative, community-engaged project that merges community voices and lived experience with innovative data science and epidemiological methods to provide a more complete ground-to-cloud picture of the public health landscape than ever before.

Our team includes decision scientists, epidemiologists, and community-engaged researchers who have specific expertise in some of the most important issues of our time:

Substance use and overdose
Emerging infectious diseases
Homelessness and housing insecurity
Mental health and suicide
Criminal justice reform

We work with local and national organizations, community activists, policymakers, and people with lived experience to integrate data-driven approaches into everything from patient care to guidelines to new legislation.

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Joshua Barocas, MD
Director of The Missing US
Professor

Josh Barocas is an Associate Professor, infectious diseases physician, PI of The Missing US Lab Project, and Director of the Social Determinants of Health and Disparities Modeling Unit at CU. He leads an interdisciplinary research program that is specifically aimed at the goal of improving health outcomes for marginalized populations who are at high risk for overdose, and infectious diseases such as HIV, hepatitis C virus, and injection-related bacterial infections. His research, which uses a combination of clinical epidemiology, health economics, simulation modeling, and cost-effectiveness, informs clinical decision making and health policy. He is engaged in research using these innovative methods to help understand the impact of and improve upon policies that affect people who use drugs. He has received funding from the National Institutes on Drug Abuse, including the prestigious Avenir Award. He has developed a microsimulation that simulates the natural history of injection drug use and projects the long-term outcomes such as overdose, endocarditis, and skin infections. I have also used longitudinal data from across the US to answer salient research questions. He serves as an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Drug Policy. He has published extensively in high impact journals including New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, and Lancet Public Health. His work has been featured in multiple media outlets including The Boston Globe, NPR, The New York Times, among others.

Collaborators

Sarah Scott, MD
Assistant Professor

Sarah Scott, MD, MSc is an Assistant Professor of Infectious Diseases at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. She attended Vanderbilt for college, medical school, and Med-Peds residency. Following residency, she was a CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) Officer assigned to the Arizona Department of Health Services and the Maricopa County Department of Public Health (2018-2020). Following EIS, and in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, she stayed at Maricopa County as a Medical Epidemiologist for two years, before returning to Infectious Diseases Fellowship at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. While in fellowship, she earned a Masters in Clinical Research, supported by the Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance (CTSA). She is interested in multidisciplinary research to better understand why marginalized populations are more vulnerable to poor health outcomes such as drug overdose, HIV and HCV, and injection-related infections. More importantly, she plans to pursue research to identify actionable and policy-relevant interventions to help improve health outcomes in these populations.

Sarah Brewer, PhD, MPA
Assistant Professor

Sarah is an Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at the CU Anschutz School of Medicine. She is health and behavior scientist, community-engagement guru, and mixed methods researcher who focuses her research on how primary care and public health systems can be catalysts for the prevention and effective management of disease in ways that deliver relevant and responsive healthcare and create equitable outcomes for people across the lifespan. She has spent nearly 15 years exploring approaches to increasing vaccine uptake and combatting vaccine hesitancy and misinformation. Her work has also addressed asthma management, advanced medical education, refugee health, primary care engagement, mental health, and maternal health. Additionally, she conducts research on the science of engagement. Grounded in her experiences of community organizing and community-based participatory action research, Sarah’s research also seeks to integrate the lived experience and optimize the impact of patient and community partners on the research process through authentic and robust engagement methods. Specifically, she studies approaches for engaging disenfranchised and underrepresented patients and communities in the conduct of research, including youth, refugee and immigrant communities, and multilingual partners.

Sarah co-directs the Training, Education and Mentorship (TEaM) Core and serves as a methodologist in the Qualitative and Mixed Methods Research Core at ACCORDS. Sarah’s research has been supported by the NIH, CDC, PCORI, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, American Cancer Society, among others. Sarah serves an academic editor for PLOS Global Public Health and she has publishes her work in journals such as American Journal of Public Health, PLOS One, Vaccine, Implementation Science, Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, and Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine.