Research

Research Interests: Clinical trial design, prediction modeling, improving replication/agreement.

Application Interests: Oncology, health equity, comparative effectiveness research.

My research has been focused on clinical trial design with an emphasis on oncology and rare disease trials. One design that I proposed allows patients with rare diseases to try multiple treatments if the first treatment is not working and allows researchers to collect more information from a smaller sample size. The proposed design is appealing for patients, researchers, and funding agencies by providing an efficient design and analytic method to identify effective treatments.

I presented this work as a poster at the Joint Statistical Meeting in 2019 and Bright Conference at MD Anderson in November. I gave an oral presentation at ENAR 2020. A manuscript is currently being revised for resubmission at Statistics in Medicine.

I also participate in collaborative, statistical research applying the knowledge I learned in the classroom to real data from the Radiation and Oncology department. I work directly with clinicians to identify interesting research questions, perform statistical analysis, interpret results, and prepare manuscripts.

These collaborations have resulted in high impact oncology papers on topics such as comparing results of observational studies to randomized clinical trials, meta-analyses of cancer treatments, and examining racial disparities in prostate cancer. This collaborative research has been presented by clinicians at the annual meetings and published in top tier journals such as Journal of Clinical Oncology and JAMA Oncology.