Division of Animal and Food Microbiology

Biography

Dr. Epiphanie Nyirabahizi is a biostatistician with the Division of Animal and Food Microbiology in the FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine’s Office of Research. She received her PhD in biostatistics from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2010. She joined FDA as a staff fellow in January 2016. Her primary responsibilities at CVM include study design, data management, and data analysis for the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS). She also collaborates with Office of Research investigators on other non-NARMS projects.

Research

• Trend analysis of antimicrobial resistance in human, animal, and retail meat isolates of foodborne bacteria.
• Use of Bayesian networks to evaluate changing antimicrobial resistance patterns and identify statistical resistance trends in NARMS target bacteria.

Select Publications

Gregory Tyson, Epiphanie Nyirabahizi, Emily Crarey, Claudine Kabera, Claudia Lam, Crystal Rice-Trujillo, Patrick F. McDermott, Heather Tate. Prevalence and Antimicrobial resistance of Enterococci isolated from retail meats in the United States, 2002 to 2014. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. Dec 2017, 84 (1) e01902-17; DOI: 10.1128/AEM.01902-17

Epiphanie Nyirabahizi, Gregory H. Tyson, Uday Dessai, Shaohua Zhao, Claudine Kabera, Claudine Kabera, Emily Crarey, Niketta Womack, Mary Katherine Crews, Heather Tate, Errol Strain. A comparison of antimicrobial resistance in E. coli and Salmonella recovered from the same food or animal samples (Submitted)

Epiphanie Nyirabahizi, Gregory H. Tyson, Claudine Kabera, Claudine Kabera, Emily Patrick F. McDermott, Heather Tate, Errol Strain. The Northeast United States has Greater Prevalence and Antibiotic Resistance among Salmonella from Retail Meat (in clearance)

Epiphanie Nyirabahizi, Gregory H. Tyson, Heather Tate, Errol Strain. Testing Antimicrobial resistance trends based on MICs mixture distributions in NARMS data. (in preparation)