The Pharmaceutical Research Computing (PRC) center is comprised of information technology specialists, programmers, statisticians, and pharmacists who have expertise in data management and analysis.

Team members have clinical expertise in pharmacotherapeutics, knowledge of reference files (e.g., drug dictionaries, ICD-9-CM, ICD-10, CPT), and a firm understanding of research methodologies, which provide important contributions to study design, operationalization of variables, and data analysis. They have extensive experience working with:

  • Large administrative claims data such as Medicare, Medicaid, and MarketScan-BIG Data
  • Secondary data sets, including Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey, Epidemiology and End Results-Medicare, Surveillance, United States Renal Data System, and Veteran's Affairs
  • Primary data, including pharmacy and medical information such as service evaluations, patient or client surveys, and more.

Team Members:

Eberechukwu Onukwugha, MS, PhD
Executive Director
220 Arch Street
12th Floor, Room 208
Baltimore, MD, 21201
Phone: (410) 706-8981
Email: eonukwug@rx.umaryland.edu

Eberechukwu (Ebere) Onukwugha, MS, PhD, is a professor of practice, sciences, and health outcomes research at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy. Onukwugha received her PhD in economics from Virginia Tech, with a concentration in econometrics. Her research interests include cost-effectiveness analysis, health disparities, and medical decision-making by individuals and institutions. She examines the costs and outcomes associated with health-related decisions, as well as the institutional and environmental context framing individuals' health-related decisions. Health-related decisions of interest include medication compliance, compliance with hospital discharge instructions, and compliance with treatment guidelines in the oncology and cardiovascular disease settings. Her research on the costs and causes of discharges against medical advice using quantitative and qualitative methods was supported by a K12 grant (1K12RR023250-01). Her research on cost-effectiveness and regression modeling has received Contributed Research Awards at international conferences sponsored by the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research, and has been published in journals such as PharmacoEconomics, Medical Care, Value in Health, Urology, and Medical Decision Making.

Abree Johnson, MS, MBA
Director
220 Arch Street
12th Floor, Room 519
Baltimore, MD 21201
Phone: (410) 706-5396
Email: ajohnson@rx.umaryland.edu

Abree Johnson earned her bachelor's degree in English from the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) and MS/MBA, with a specialization in project management, from UMUC. She is an experienced project manager as well as data analyst using a variety of software applications such as MS Excel, SAS, and ArcGIS. Johnson has worked with investigators to construct variables from secondary data sources such as Centers for Medicare and Medicaid for the past three years, and nearly eight years in working with HSCRC data. She has extensive experience managing data studies by operationalizing variables and creating study files needed for analysis. She is acutely familiar with the processes needed to develop detailed specifications for analytic file construction utilizing patient level clinical diagnosis, procedure coding systems (e.g., ICD-9-CM, KABCO), demographic and billing variables. She is accustomed to collaborating and coordinating with SAS programmers to prepare final project deliverables such as analytic files, tables, or reports. She has assisted many PIs with primary data collection using structured questionnaires and performed administrative tasks including completing institutional review board applications and preparing data use agreements or memorandums of understanding.

Faculty Advisors

Kathleen A. Ryan, MPH, MS
Statistician
220 Arch Street, Room 01-517
Phone: (410) 706-1498
Email: Kathleen.ryan@rx.umaryland.edu

Ryan has been with the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) since 2003. She received a Bachelor of Science in microbiology from the University of Maryland. She also has a Master of Public Health in epidemiology from Emory University and a Master of Science in bioinformatics from the University of Maryland Global Campus. Ryan has programmed in SAS for more than 20 years. Prior to PRC, Ryan worked at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where she worked on projects in stroke populations, in osteoarthritis, and others. Most of her work was with the Amish Research Program, which is comprised of many studies researching complex diseases and genetics in a founder population. She has been a coauthor on more than 120 publications throughout her career at UMB. Since starting with PRC, she has worked with Medicare and Medicaid claims data using Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services prepared files creating analytic files, performing quality assurance, and providing statistical analysis. Additionally, she has supported the Pharmaceutical Health Services Research (PHSR) graduate program through PHSR 631 and Research Methods (PHSR 701 and PHSR 702).  

Patricia Stewart
Senior Health Services Research Programmer
220 Arch Street, Room 01-521
Phone: (410) 706-3112
Email: pstewart@rx.umaryland.edu

Stewart has a Bachelor of Science in mathematics education and a minor in health from the University of Maryland. She has more than 30 master's credits in math education and computer science from the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University. Stewart is a SAS programmer and serves as one of PRC’s primary quality control reviewers. She has been a SAS programmer for more than 30 years, experienced in data manipulation using SAS data steps and macros. She has worked in SAS creating analytic files, summarizing and reporting results. She has more than five years of experience in processing and analyzing health care data sets, such as those from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and Health Services Cost Review Commission inpatient and outpatient data files. She has experience in creating analytic files and conducting analysis utilizing patient level clinical, demographic and billing data.  

Susan Maskery, PhD
Senior Health Services Research Programmer 
220 Arch Street, Room 01-511
Phone: (410) 706-7613
Email: Smaskery@rx.umaryland.edu

Maskery has a PhD in chemical engineering from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey and a Bachelor’s of Science and Engineering in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. Her thesis work focused on modeling growth cone pathfinding to understand the interaction of stochastic vs deterministic processes on pathfinding success. After graduate school, Maskery switched her focus to biomedical informatics – data wrangling, modeling, visualization, and mining. She has more than 10 years’ experience in wrangling disparate medical, clinical trials, and biomarker data into data products for data mining and other analyses using R and Python.

Reuben Don, MPH
Health Services Research Programmer
220 Arch Street, Room 01-513
Phone: (410) 706-0080
Email: RDon@rx.umaryland.edu

Don obtained his BS in neuroscience from The Ohio State University in 2013. He initially began his science career as a post-baccalaureate fellow at the National Institutes of Health, where he studied the neurobiological underpinnings of reward, motivation, and substance use. Through this experience, he found an interest in data analysis and programming, which led him to pursue his Master of Public Health with a focus on biostatistics and epidemiology) at Johns Hopkins University. Since joining PRC, Don has been a SAS programmer, where he has used his programming skills to analyze medical datasets and help inform clinical decision making. 

Chih Chun (Jack) Tung, MS
Health Services Research Programmer
220 Arch Street, Room 01-510
Phone: (410) 706-0811
Email: Chihchun.tung@rx.umaryland.edu

Tung has a MS in biomedical engineering from the University of California, Davis. Tung has an extensive background and is proficient in SQL and SAS. Since joining PRC, Tung has worked with Premier, IQVIA, and Medicare data to create analytic files.

Geoffrey Rowland
PRC Systems Administrator
Pharmacy Learning Center, 120
Phone: (410) 706-1180
Email: growland@rx.umaryland.edu

Rowland has a BS in computer science from Frostburg State University. He brings more than a decade of experience in programming, web development, and systems administration to the team. Rowland is responsible for the performance, integrity, and security of all of PRC’s system operations and is instrumental in PRC's system operations and data maintenance. He has a strong background in Linux and open-source software. Prior to joining the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, Rowland worked on a wide variety of projects ranging from building systems to get climate information to rural populations of developing countries to designing and building infrastructure for a multi-media studio startup.

Barbara L. Anuszewski
Coordinator, Research Projects
220 Arch Street, Room 01-519
Phone: (410) 706-3266
Email: Banuszewski@rx.umaryland.edu

Anuszewski has a BS in social sciences and 36 years’ experience at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. She has an extensive background in startup administration and financial services. Anuszewski oversees maintenance of system users, data use agreements, required trainings, and account invoicing and reconciliation.