Christina Battista, Ph.D.
Principal Scientist
Quantitative Systems Pharmacology
About Christina
Christina Battista, Ph.D., is a senior scientist at Simulations Plus, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Drug Safety Sciences located within the Eshelman School of Pharmacy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Dr. Battista, along with Lisl Shoda, is exploring the role of the immune system in drug-induced liver injury (DILI) with a particular focus on mechanistic modeling of the adaptive immune system, in hopes of investigating cases of idiosyncratic DILI. Christina also works on modeling and evaluating new exemplar compounds to be included in future versions of DILIsym software. Dr. Battista also utilizes DILIsym in proprietary projects to help evaluate DILI risk for sponsor compounds in clinical development.
Dr. Battista received her bachelor of science and master of science in applied and computational mathematics from Rochester Institute of Technology in 2011. Her master’s thesis modeled parathyroid hormone and cell signaling dynamics in bone remodeling to predict the efficacy of osteoporosis treatments. Dr. Battista earned her Ph.D. in applied mathematics with an interdisciplinary concentration in physiology from North Carolina State University in 2015. Her research focused on parameter estimation and modeling one-dimensional blood flow in viscoelastic arterial networks.
In June 2016, Dr. Battista received an ORISE fellowship to investigate mechanistic drug safety within the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) at the FDA under the guidance of Darrell Abernethy. Christina is also a member of the Pi Mu Epsilon and Alpha Sigma Lambda honor societies and was named a John Wiley Jones scholar at RIT. She has presented her research at numerous engineering, math, and biology conferences. Most notably, Dr. Battista has given presentations at the World Congress of Biomechanics and the Joint Mathematics Meetings. Her current work will be presented at future pharmacology conferences, such as the American Conference on Pharmacometrics (ACoP).
