Assistant Professor
College of Social and Behavioral Science
Department of Family and Consumer Studies
Dr. Carlson is a medical sociologist and family demographer. He is interested in examining variations across gender, socioeconomic status, and race/ethnicity in individuals’ life course transitions, trajectories, and contexts and the consequences of this variation for health disparities and social inequalities.
Professional Titles
- PhD, Biomedical Informatics, Genetic Epidemiology Focus
- MStat, Mathematical Statistics
Research and Professional Experience
For the first 11 years of her career, Dr. Knight worked as a master level statistician studying injury and emergency medical care. In 2010, Dr. Knight obtained a PhD in Biomedical Informatics with a focus on genetic epidemiology.
For her doctorate dissertation, she was awarded the James W. Prahl Memorial Award for Outstanding Contributions by a Graduate Student in Biological or Biomedical Sciences at the University of Utah.
Upon completing her dissertation, Dr. Knight took a postdoctoral research associate position in the Division of Genetic Epidemiology in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Utah.
After her postdoctoral training, Dr. Knight joined Intermountain Heart Institute as a Cardiovascular and Genetic Epidemiologist. Today, she oversees the Intermountain Genealogy Registry for use in family-based genetic research. She has also been involved in the study of relationship between respiratory viral infections and cardiovascular ischemic events.
Current Projects
- Intermountain Genealogy Registry:
The Intermountain Genealogy Registry includes almost 700,000 individuals who have lived in the Intermountain U.S. Region and also been a patient at Intermountain Healthcare.
For each individual, Dr. Knight has matched genealogical data from public sources to data from medical records.
The data from this registry will be utilized to help identify genetic factors (variants, genes, pathways, and biomarkers) that are associated with cardiovascular diseases or risk factors.
- Respiratory Viral Infections Triggering Acute Cardiovascular Events:
Dr. Knight is currently leading a project to identify the biological mechanisms that trigger cardiovascular events in the setting of respiratory viral infections.
Her work is set to determine effective clinical treatments to prevent these triggers in patients with respiratory viral infections.