Juan-David Rueda, MD, MS, is a 5th year PhD candidate in the Pharmaceutical Health Services Research (PHSR) Graduate Program at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, Baltimore, MD, USA.

Originally from Bogotá, Colombia, Juan-David received his MD from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. He currently serves as a graduate research assistant for Professors C. Daniel Mullins and Julia Slejko. Before joining PHSR, Juan-David worked as a physician in the Metabolic and Nutritional Support Team at Hospital Universitario San Ignacio in Bogotá, Colombia, treating critically ill patients in the Intensive Care Unit. In addition, as a research assistant at the Universidad Javeriana’s Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, he was part of the team that developed most of Colombia’s national practice guidelines for mental health, pediatrics, and cardiovascular disease. He developed models to assess the cost-effectiveness of the questions prioritized by clinicians. These models were designed to guide clinical decisions regarding drug and technology use, and his experience in working on them reinforced his interest in decision-making scenarios that include high levels of uncertainty.

Juan-David has experience on measuring race disparities in mental health research and he collaborated with the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research in studying the relationship between impairment, mental illness diagnosis, and racial disparities in psychotropic medication. Currently, he is applying machine-learning algorithms to the analysis of censored cost data.

His goal after finishing the PhD program is to integrate the knowledge of Real-World Data and the natural history of disease in order to fine-tune decision analytic models and predictive models.