About the Vaccine Study Center (2024)

Vaccine Study Center Team

Nicola P. Klein, MD, PhD, FAAP
Director

Nicola P. Klein, MD, PhD, is the director of the Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center, which she joined as co-director in 2006. She is also a senior research scientist at the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research. Her research interests include vaccine safety and efficacy, genetic influences on vaccine responses, and vaccine responses among at-risk populations (premature infants and children with chronic or genetic diseases). She is the principal investigator of numerous vaccine safety studies, and has published widely on vaccine safety and efficacy in children and infants. She received her medical degree and her doctorate in biochemistry, as part of the Medical Scientist Training Program funded by the National Institutes of Health, at New York University School of Medicine. She completed her residency in pediatrics at the Lucile Salter Packard Children’s Hospital (LPCH) at Stanford University School of Medicine, and subsequently completed a Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment (CISA) Network Vaccine Safety Fellowship, sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at Stanford. She is board certified in pediatrics and is a professor in the Department of Health Systems Science at the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine.

Ousseny Zerbo, PhD
Research Scientist

Ousseny Zerbo, PhD, is a Research Scientist in the Vaccine Study Center at Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research. His research interest is in maternal vaccination during pregnancy and early childhood health outcomes, vaccine uptake, safety and effectiveness. He is the principal investigator on two NIH-funded projects to investigate the effectiveness of influenza vaccination, COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy, and infant risk of influenza and COVID-19. He also studies risk factors associated with autism spectrum disorders. Prior to joining the Vaccine Study Center, he completed post-doctoral training in the Autism Research Program at the Division of Research. He received his PhD in epidemiology from the University of California Davis and his bachelor’s degree in biological science and teaching credential from the University of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, West Africa.

Karen Jacobson, MD, MPH
Research Scientist

Dr. Karen Jacobson joined the Vaccine Study Center at the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research in 2023 as a Research Scientist. She is a board-certified Infectious Diseases physician. Dr. Jacobson obtained a bachelor of arts in Human Biology from Stanford University and a doctor of medicine and master of Public Health from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She completed her residency training in Internal Medicine/HIV Primary Care at the Yale-New Haven Hospital and her fellowship in Infectious Diseases at Stanford. Dr. Jacobson’s research is focused on mitigating sequelae of infectious diseases, particularly SARS-CoV-2. She is co-Investigator of multiple outpatient studies of treatments for acute and convalescent SARS-CoV-2 disease, and her published work has described clinical and immunologic correlations of Long COVID and risk of post-vaccination infection with SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern.

Janelle Baires, MSN, RN
Clinical Research Nurse Manager

Latisha M. Burun, BSN, RN, CPN
Clinical Trial Research Nurse II

Latisha ‘Tish’ Burun has been a Clinical Trials Research Nurse with the Vaccine Study Center since 2014. Tish provides regulatory management and study management support for our clinical trials. She began her career with us as a study site clinical research nurse in the Sacramento region. Before joining the Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center team, Tish worked as a pediatric urology clinic nurse and a pediatric trauma charge nurse. Tish has a bachelor of science in nursing from California State University, Los Angeles, is licensed as a registered nurse in California, and holds a certification in pediatric nursing.

Dominique Cabanero
Research Assistant

Dominique Cabanero joined the Vaccine Study Center in 2022 as a research assistant, and she provides support to our clinical trials and to other staff members within the VSC office. She joined the Vaccine Study Center after working for 12 years in the dental field. She currently studies healthcare management at SNHU and hopes to pursue a master’s degree in public health.

Charlie C. Chao, MA, CCRP
Clinical Trial Research Coordinator III

Charlie C. Chao, MA, CCRP, has been with us since 2000 as a clinical trial research coordinator III. In this role, he supports Kaiser Permanente’s Principles of Responsibility; ensures compliance with procedures; maintains the security and confidentiality of participants’ data; reviews medical records and test results; and abstracts needed data per protocol requirements. He coordinates and prepares protocol specimens for shipping or storage in accordance with regulations and sponsor shipping guidelines; assists in study closure activities; and coordinates study vaccines storage and shipping. He works on federally funded projects including CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink and Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment and on clinical trial projects. Before joining us, he worked in an outpatient pharmacy at Kaiser Permanente, San Rafael.

Kristin Goddard, MPH
Project Manager

Kristin Goddard joined the Vaccine Study Center (VSC) in 2015. Prior to working at the VSC Kristin was a project manager at Permanente Colorado’s Institute for Health Research overseeing the FDA’s Mini-Sentinel drug safety surveillance program and vaccine communication projects focused on how and when people make vaccination decisions. Before joining Kaiser Permanente, she was a vaccine policy fellow with the National Vaccine Program Office at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Currently Kristin manages VSC’s federally funded research portfolio which includes the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink, Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment work, and vaccine effectiveness research through the VISION collaboration. She is engaged in all aspects of a project’s lifecycle from grant proposal and budget development to data analysis and manuscript writing. Her professional interests include vaccine safety, infectious disease surveillance, health communication and decision making, as well as evidence-based policymaking. Kristin earned a master of public health in health behavior and health education from the University of Michigan and a bachelor of science in agriculture and education from The Ohio State University.

John Hansen, MPH
Project Manager

John Hansen, MPH, has been a Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center adverse event coordinator and project manager since 1993. He manages programmers and serves as project manager for post-marketing safety studies, his primary research interest. In his role as a project manager, his responsibilities include planning and coordinating with manufacturers to ensure the safety of vaccines that have been licensed and brought to market. In 2001-2003, he served as a member of the Brighton Collaboration Working Groups on Fever and lntussusception. He earned his bachelor’s in sociology and his master of public health, with a specialty in epidemiology/biostatistics, at the University of California, Berkeley.

Amber H. Hyman, PhD, MPH
Project Manager

Amber H. Hyman, PhD, MPH, joined the Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center in 2016 as a senior research project manager. Her responsibilities include project management for post-licensure and epidemiological studies. Before joining us, she worked as a research scientist at the International Vaccine Institute, focused on assessing the effectiveness of an oral cholera vaccine given to displaced populations in southern Malawi. She has also worked in academic research on chronic disease modeling and cost-effectiveness analysis of government assistance programs. She earned her bachelor of arts in public health and mass communications at the University of California, Berkeley, her master of public health (health policy) at Columbia University, and a PhD in public health at Technical University of Berlin.

Debbie C. Jacobs, CCRC
Clinical Trial Research Coordinator III

Debbie C. Jacobs, clinical trial research coordinator II, has been with us since 2004 coordinating clinical trial research tasks. She provides research, operational, and administrative support to the Kaiser Permanente Northern California principal investigators, the clinical trials administrative director, and other research staff members conducting multiple Food and Drug Administration-regulated clinical trials. Before joining our staff, she was a medical transcriptionist and medical office manager for a private practice.

Evan Layefsky, BA
Research Associate

Evan Layefsky has been with the Vaccine Study Center since 2021 as a Research Associate II. His role includes managing Dr. Zerbo’s portfolio of research projects, which focus on maternal vaccination effectiveness and safety, as well as sexually transmitted infection studies. He also works closely with the medical record abstraction staff to build chart abstraction and clinical databases. Evan has worked at Kaiser’s Division of Research since graduating from UC Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in public health in 2017.

Tia Myagmarjav, BS
Senior Research Assistant

Tia joined VSC in 2021 as a senior research assistant. Her role includes running daily activities of active studies. She provides administrative and operational support for clinical trials staff and nurses. Before joining the VSC, Tia worked on kidney and cardiovascular studies at the DOR. In the future, she would like to pursue a master’s degree in nursing.

Courtney A. Oxandale, RN, BSN, CPN, CCRC
CT Research Nurse

Lisa Powell, BS, MHA
Senior Research Project Manager

Lisa Powell, BS, started with the Vaccine Study Center in 1991 as a research assistant. Currently, she is a research project manager. In her current role, she is responsible for taking care of the department’s HR needs, such as hiring and training. She also works closely with the administrative director to plan and coordinate the activities of all non-physician personnel nationally. In addition, she is the remote data manager, responsible for the data entry staff. In this role, she ensures that the data entry staff keeps the data entry flowing and completed in a timely manner, and she manages the queries for all the remote data entry studies.

Pat Ross, BA
Project Manager

Pat Ross has been with the Vaccine Study Center since 1997. In her initial position as a research assistant she began working with data cleaning vaccine injection logs, and worked extensively with research nurses. She moved on to become a research associate III, and is currently a project manager. Pat has worked extensively with the medical record analyst staff at Division of Research to complete chart review studies. Pat has designed and implemented data collection tools specific to studies’ requirements. She has helped evolve the data collection tools to paper-less Quick Review forms. During the COVID-19 pandemic Pat worked extensively on programming data collection tools in RedCap. Pat continues to apply her RedCap programming skills on non-COVID-19 related studies. Pat graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in English literature in 1992.

Amy Wiesner, BSN, RN
CT Administrative Director III

In Memoriam

Roger Paul Baxter, MD, FACP

Roger Paul Baxter, MD, FACP, was co-director of the Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center from 2006 until his death in late 2016. As principal investigator for many studies of vaccines, biologics, and the epidemiology of infectious diseases, and the author of extensive studies on vaccine safety and effectiveness, he helped to build the reputation of the Vaccine Study Center as a national resource for vaccine research and expertise. Prior to joining the Vaccine Study Center and devoting himself full-time to research, Dr. Baxter practiced internal medicine and infectious diseases at Kaiser Permanente, Oakland for 15 years. Board certified in both internal medicine and infectious diseases, he led the Kaiser Permanente Influenza Vaccination Program, helping to ensure yearly vaccination for more than 1 million members, and directed Kaiser Permanente’s influenza surveillance program for more than 13 years. In 2014, he received the Morris F. Collen Research Award for “answering critical questions about vaccine safety and effectiveness to the benefit of people around the globe.”