Dr. Martina Morris’s primary contributions to science have been statistical methods for network analysis, with applications to the population dynamics of HIV transmission. For two decades, she has co-led (with Drs. Mark S. Handcock and Steven Goodreau), the NIH-funded team that developed the Exponential family Random Graph Models (ERGMs) framework for statistical network analysis. Their methods are designed to work with both sampled and census network data, and are published in a suite of open-source R packages under the statnet organization on CRAN and GitHub. Over the last decade, with Dr. Sam Jenness, they extended this foundation to develop a comprehensive, principled framework for stochastic modeling of epidemics on dynamic networks that is now implemented in the open-source software package EpiModel. Her current applied research projects focus on the application of these methods to local HIV prevention planning efforts. She is committed to the development of innovative statistical methodology that addresses critical needs in public health, to applications of these methods to support HIV prevention efforts, and to a transparent, reproducible science workflow, ensuring access to the methodology by creating open-source, user-friendly tools.
