Research Focus
Neuroinformatics
It is through observation that scientific teams improve our understanding of how the brain works and enhance our toolbox for maintaining and improving brain health. We observe how people eat and move, where they live, their social activity, electrical activity in their brain, how they use the healthcare system, and their memory and cognition. My research is focused on methods and processes for translating these observations into knowledge and care. Research opportunities can be identified by embedding statistical thinking into how studies are developed and designed, how data are collected and prepared, and how they are analyzed and interpreted. Modifying the way we randomize participants to treatments can lead to a more efficient balance of clinical and demographic characteristics in small clinical trials. New detection methods for observations that appear usual along a single measure but suspicious across several – such as a six-foot-tall person who weighs 130 pounds – can identify recording errors, illuminate new perspectives, and signal human diversity. Developing new analytic approaches can highlight natural relationships among measures of memory, attention, mood, imaging, movement, blood chemistry, and nutrition. The return on this biostatistical research is better quality, nuance, and efficiency of brain health discovery based on quantitative evidence.