Lisa Saiman, MD, MPH
CF Referral Center Director & Principal Investigator
Dr. Lisa Saiman is a Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at Columbia University and an Attending Professor of Pediatrics at the Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian, Columbia University Medical Center where she has served as the hospital epidemiologist since 1994. Dr. Saiman’s areas of expertise include CF and hospital epidemiology and infection control.
Dr. Saiman has been the director of the CF Foundation’s CF Referral Center for Susceptibility and Synergy Studies since its inception in 1991. Dr. Saiman served as the co-Principal Investigator of a double-blinded, randomized placebo-controlled, multi-center trial of azithromycin in CF patients infected with Pseudomonas aeruginosa and continues to study macrolide antibiotics in CF patients in a multi-center, multinational study of azithromycin in CF patients uninfected with P. aeruginosa. She is also the Principal Investigator of a multi-center study to investigate Barriers to Implementation of Infection Control Guidelines among healthcare workers, CF patients and their families.
Dr. Saiman is a member of the CF Foundation’s Clinical Research Committee, the North American CF Meeting planning committee, the Data Safety and Monitoring Board, the Antimicrobial Task Force, and was the co-chair of the consensus documents Infection Control in CF (2001), Aerosolized antibiotics in CF (1997), and Infectious Diseases and Microbiology in CF (1994).
Dr. Saiman is a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Society of Pediatric Research, the American Society of Microbiology, the Infectious Disease Society of America, the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, the Society of Hospital Epidemiology of America, the Society of Pediatric Research and the American Pediatric Society. She is on the editorial board of The Pediatric Infectious Diseases Journal and Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology and has published over 100 papers on topic in infectious diseases, CF, and hospital epidemiology.

Elizabeth Garber, MSc
Laboratory Supervisor
Elizabeth oversees the logistical responsibilities of the laboratory. Elizabeth is also the Project Coordinator for other CF related projects under the directives of Dr. Lisa Saiman. She is currently the Project Coordinator of a multi-center study to assess Barriers to Implementation of Infection Control Guidelines in CF among healthcare workers, CF patients and their families at 25 CF care centers in the United States.

Elizabeth began her work in the Department of Pediatrics as a Program Analyst in March 1999. She was responsible for three projects funded by the Centers for Disease Control and the New York  City Department of Health: [1]“Costs of Implementing and Maintaining Tuberculin Skin Testing (TST) Programs and staffTRAK-TB in Selected Health Departments and Hospitals,” she assessed the financial impact of TST programs in New York compared with programs in San Diego and New Jersey; [2]“Latent Tuberculosis Infection (LBTI) Among Laboratory Healthcare Workers in New York City,” she studied the prevalence of LTBI and conversion rates among healthcare workers in 19 microbiology laboratories in New York City; and [3]“Tuberculosis in Children: Epidemiology, Diagnostic Methods and Nosocomial Transmission,” she was responsible for tracking conversion rates among pediatric healthcare workers, as a continuation of a CDC-sponsored study that began in 1995.

Elizabeth previously worked for more than 10 years as a Medical Technologist and a Medical Laboratory Officer in clinical microbiology laboratories in the United Kingdom, and with the Clinical Microbiology Service at NewYork-Presbyterian, Columbia University Medical Center, NY. She has a Masters degree in Control of Infectious Diseases from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in England.

Setareh Tabibi
Laboratory Technologist
Setareh is a senior research technologist. She also conducts the daily operations of the CF Referral Center laboratory, including susceptibility and synergy testing and generating official reports.

Setareh is involved in other research projects such as the evaluation of optimal method of susceptibility testing for colistin.

She was involved in other studies entitled “Cathelicidin Peptides Inhibit Multiply Antibiotic Resistant Pathogens from Patients with Cystic Fibrosis,” and “Identification and Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing of Alcaligenes xylosoxidans Isolated from Patients with Cystic Fibrosis.”

Yunhua Chen
Laboratory Technologist
Yunhua is also a senior research technologist. He conducts the daily operations of the CF Referral Center laboratory, including susceptibility and synergy testing and generating official reports.

Yunhua was also involved in other projects such as the “In vitro Activity of Doripenem (S-4661) against Multidrug-resistant Gram Negative Bacilli Isolated from Patients with Cystic Fibrosis,” the "Evaluation of the Efficacy, Safety, Tolerance and Pharmacokinetics of Meropenem for the Treatment of Acute Pulmonary Exacerbations in Patients with Cystic Fibrosis Research Study," and the study on the “Antimicrobial Susceptibility and Synergy Studies of Stenotrophomonas maltophilia Isolated from Patients with Cystic Fibrosis.”

Julia Juyan Zhou, MS, MPH
Epidemiologist
Julia serves as the Data Analyst for the CF Referral Center for Susceptibility and Synergy Studies.

Julia has a Masters of Public Health in Environmental Health Science from the Joseph L. Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, and a Masters of Science in Microbiology from Nankai University.

Julia is the David Lidsky Epidemiologist for the Department of Pediatrics at Columbia University. She is the Research Coordinator for two NIH-funded studies “Examination of Gram-Negative Resistance Patterns in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit” and “Tuberculosis Immunity in Children.”

In the past, Julia has participated in both CF Foundation funded and CDC funded studies. These include “Measurement of Bacterial Shedding in CF Clinics,” “Barriers to Implementation of Infection Control Guidelines for CF,” “Latent TB Infection in Children: Development of Pediatric TST Consensus Statement and Educational Products,” “Cooperative Agreement to Study the Implementation of staffTRAK-TB” and “Tuberculosis in Children: Epidemiology, Diagnostic Methods and Nosocomial Transmission.”