Faculty
Methodologic and collaborative interests of our graduate research advisors are shown below. PhD applicants considering our program may want to review our process for selecting a dissertation advisor.
Professors
Changyong Feng, PhD
University of Rochester
Interests
Multivariate survival analysis; empirical processes theory; longitudinal data analysis; statistical methods in epidemiology and clinical trials. Full Profile
Brent Johnson, PhD
North Carolina State University
Interests
Semi-parametric methods for missing data problems with specific applications to causal inference, survival and longitudinal data; dynamic treatment regimes in therapeutic HIV and AIDS studies, infusion trials, neurological and behavioral disorders; pattern analysis in HIV prevention; statistical methods for epidemiology. Full Profile of Brent Johnson, PhD
Michael McDermott, PhD
Department Associate Chair; ASA Fellow
University of Rochester
Interests
Order-restricted inference; receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and surfaces; methods for combining p-values; meta-analysis; missing data problems; clinical trials methodology; applications in neurological disease. Full Profile of Michael McDermott, PhD
David Oakes, PhD
ASA Fellow; IMS Fellow
London University
Interests
Survival analysis, including multivariate survival data and frailty models; semiparametric inference; clinical trials; applications in environmental medicine and neurological disease. Full Profile of David Oakes, PhD
Derick Peterson, PhD
University of California, Berkeley
Interests
Construction of prognostic gene expression profiles from high-dimensional transcriptomic data; model selection; nonparametric estimation and inference; data-driven smoothing methods; analysis of censored survival data; applications in cancer, cardiology, and infectious respiratory diseases. Full Profile of Derick Peterson, PhD
Xing Qiu, PhD
University of Rochester
Interests
High-dimensional Omics data pre-processing, analyses, modeling, and integration; diffusion tensor imaging analysis; dynamic network analysis based on ordinary differential equations and state-space model; differential geometry and its applications to hypothesis testing procedures based on correlation/covariance. Full Profile of Xing Qiu, PhD
Robert Strawderman, ScD
Department Chair; ASA Fellow; IMS Fellow
Harvard University
Interests
Statistical methods for point process data (e.g., survival analysis, recurrent events), with application to risk and outcome prediction in medicine, epidemiology and public health; statistical learning methods; dynamic treatment regimes and causal inference; asymptotics (theory and approximation); statistical computing. Full Profile of Robert Strawderman, ScD
Sally Thurston, PhD
Department Diversity and Inclusion Officer; ASA Fellow
Harvard University
Interests
Bayesian inference; modeling multiple outcomes; correction for measurement error bias; informative prior specification; latent variable models; hierarchical models; models for multiple correlated exposures; environmental health applications. Full Profile
Abdus Wahed, PhD
Department Associate Chair; ASA Fellow
North Carolina State University
Interests
Personalized medicine; development of statistical methods for testing dynamic treatment regimes (adaptive treatment strategies) from Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trials (SMARTs); multivariate ordinal longitudinal data analysis; survival analysis; causal inference; semiparametric inference. Full Profile
of Matthew McCall, PhD
Tongtong Wu, PhD
M.A. Statistics Program Director
M.S. Biostatistics Program Director
University of California, Los Angeles
Interests
High-dimensional data analysis; survival analysis; machine learning; computational statistics; computational biology and statistical genetics; longitudinal data analysis. Full Profile
Associate Professors
Christopher Beck, PhD
University of Rochester
Interests
Inference concerning receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and surfaces; change-point problems; clinical trials; applications in orthopedics and neurological disease. Full Profile
Ashkan Ertefaie, PhD
McGill University
Interests
Causal inference; dynamic treatment regimes; sequential multiple assignment randomized trials; comparative effectiveness studies using electronic health records; instrumental variable analyses; high-dimensional data analysis; post selection inference; survival analysis. Full Profile
of Christopher Beck, PhD
Iowa State University
Interests
Clustering and latent variable models; mixed membership models and model choice; normalization and preprocessing issues relating to gene expression and proteomics data; Bayesian models for QTLs and growth curves; hierarchical Bayesian models for gene expression data; scalable parallel model-based clustering. Full Profile of Tanzy Love, PhD
Matthew McCall, PhD
Ph.D. Program Director
Johns Hopkins University
Interests
Statistical genomics; bioinformatics; systems biology; biomedical data science; statistical methods for miRNA-seq data; cancer gene regulatory network estimation; adjusting for cellular composition on tissue-level gene expression; preprocessing and analysis of microglia imaging data. Full Profile of Tongtong Wu, PhD
Assistant Professors
Seong-Hwan Jun, PhD
University of British Columbia
Interests
Bayesian models and computation; probabilistic machine learning; graphical models; statistical inference for combinatorial problems; statistical methods for analysis of single cell transcriptomics data; multi-omics data integration; cancer genomics; cancer-immune interaction; phylogenetics. Full Profile
(Dr. Jun is joining the Statistics PhD program faculty in January 2024)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Interests
Component modeling of neural responses; neural encoding models; brain organization; speech and music perception; sound synthesis; deep learning; functional MRI; human intracranial electrophysiology; temporal integration. Full Profile
of Ashkan Ertefaie, P
of Andrew McDavid, PhD
Michael Sohn, PhD
University of Arizona
Interests
High-dimensional data analysis; compositional data analysis; statistical machine learning; causal mediation analysis; genomics and metagenomics. Full Profile
of Michael Sohn, PhD
Additional Department Faculty
For a full listing of faculty appointments in the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology, please visit our department faculty roster.
Faculty Collaborations and Medical Research
Faculty are currently involved in wide-ranging collaborative activity with the Environmental Health Sciences Center, the Cancer Center, the Center for Neurotherapeutics Discovery, the Center for Health and Technology, the Center for Oral Biology, the Clinical Cardiovascular Research Center, and the School of Nursing. Faculty also work closely with the Departments of Medicine, Neurology, Public Health Sciences, Pediatrics, Psychiatry, Emergency Medicine, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Ophthalmology, Dentistry, and Biomedical Genetics. The department houses Biostatistics Centers for the Parkinson’s Study Group, Huntington’s Study Group, and Muscle Study Group and is responsible for the statistical analysis of many recent and ongoing multicenter clinical trials of new treatments for those diseases.
Department faculty have played major roles in important breakthroughs in medical research at Rochester. Examples include:
- the better understanding of the role of calcium channel blockers in treating patients who have had a heart attack
- demonstration of both the clinical effectiveness and the cost effectiveness of implantable defibrillators in reducing mortality among certain heart disease patients
- demonstration of the effectiveness of deprenyl in slowing onset of disability in early Parkinson’s disease
- demonstration of the benefit of surfactant therapy for respiratory distress syndrome in premature infants
- demonstration of the benefits and risks of early surgical therapy for drug-resistant temporal lobe epilepsy
- an ongoing epidemiologic study of the assessment of the effects of low levels of dietary mercury intake on childhood development.