Statistical Design and Analysis

Biography
Carla Bann, PhD, is director of the Program Evaluation and Outcome Measurement program within RTI's Statistics and Epidemiology unit. She has over 12 years of experience in psychometric analysis, scale and index development, program evaluation, and statistical analysis of behavioral data. Her research interests include maternal and child health and she has served as a psychometrician for several large-scale data coordinating centers focused on improving maternal and child outcomes. Dr. Bann also has participated in numerous studies focused on the areas of health-related knowledge, quality of life, and informed decision making. Her statistical skills encompass a variety of techniques, including structural equation modeling, latent growth curve analysis, item response theory, and factor analysis. She has published her research findings in several peer-reviewed journals, including Medical Care, Pediatrics, Quality of Life Research, PharmacoEconomics, Depression and Anxiety, Journal of Applied Gerontology, and Health Care for Women International. Read More…

Biography
Sheri Fehnel, PhD, is Global Head of Patient-Reported Outcomes in RTI Health Solutions. She specializes in the development and evaluation of questionnaires designed to measure health-related quality of life, patient satisfaction, resource utilization, and other patient-reported outcomes. Dr. Fehnel has moderated countless focus groups, conducted cognitive interviews patient and professional populations, and assessed potential sources of measurement error through cognitive forms appraisal. She has evaluated the psychometric properties of survey and clinical instruments using factor analysis, structural equations modeling, and item response theory. Read More…

Biography
Ralph Folsom, PhD and Chief Scientist for Statistical, Survey, and Computing Sciences at RTI, is an expert in the design and analysis of complex probability samples. Working on the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), Dr. Folsom initiated innovative weight adjustment methods based on his logistic response propensity and exponential poststratification models. Dr. Folsom also introduced model-based imputations for missing frequency of use and income data items, and he has been an influential collaborator in the development of NSDUH’s current Predictive Mean Neighborhoods (PMN) imputation methodology. Dr. Folsom has made significant contributions to the development of RTI’s computer software for survey data analysis, SUDAAN. These contributions include sample design-based modes of estimation and inference for linear and logistic regression coefficients. Read More…

Biography
Tyler Hartwell, Ph.D., a statistician, has been with RTI since 1964. He has extensive experience in designing large-scale clinical and behavioral trials, epidemiological multisite studies, and environmental exposure studies. Dr. Hartwell’s research areas include clinical and behavioral trials, international multisite trials, delivery and evaluation of community and worksite health intervention programs, and environmental issues. He has published widely on a variety of topics. He has been the principal or co-principal investigator on numerous large-scale studies and has managed a large group of statisticians. Read More…

Biography
Vincent G. Iannacchione, a senior research statistician, has been with RTI for over 22 years. He directs statistical operations for national surveys on health care, drug abuse, education, and military studies. He designs and selects samples, including multistage area and list sampling, network sampling, and double sampling for nonresponse. He directs the computation of sampling weights and the imputation of missing data, and he supervises data analysis. Read More…

Biography

Helen Koo discusses unintended pregnancies and teen pregnancies in the US

Biography

Lee Rivers Mobley, PhD, Senior Fellow in health economics, appointed December 2008, specializes in spatial epidemiology and analysis of health care markets and behaviors, using spatial modeling, spatial econometrics, spatial decision support systems, and cartographical modeling. Dr. Mobley was named an RTI Fellow in 2005. She joined RTI in July 2001, and her work at RTI has included market analysis for several Medicare reform initiatives, spatial analysis to explain cardiac risk factors in low income women, and analysis of access to and utilization of preventive care services. Her research reveals why people disenroll from Medicare HMOs or don't get regular cancer screening. Dr. Mobley is currently funded by two NIH grants, and conducts analyses of disparities among populations and across geography, examining socioecological problems where place and space are important. Her research interests include behavioral modeling, measurement of the built environment, remote sensing as a resource for data development, gap or suitability analysis, and building spatial decision support systems.

Biography
Sally C. Morton, Ph.D., joined RTI in 2005 as vice president of statistics and epidemiology. Previously, Dr. Morton was head of the RAND Corporation Statistics Group from 1995 to 2002 and held the RAND endowed chair in statistics from 2000 to 2005. From 1997 to 2005, she was co-director of the Southern California Evidence-based Practice Center. Her methodological interests include the use of meta-analysis in evidence-based medicine, the sampling of vulnerable populations, and statistical methods for health services research. She is an editor of Statistical Science and served as an associate editor for the Journal of the American Statistical Association and the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics. Dr. Morton is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Read More…

Biography
Scott Novak, PhD, is a developmental epidemiologist in RTI's behavioral health epidemiology program. His research interests lie primarily in the causes, correlates, and consequences of psychiatric disorders, including the behavioral and psychiatric sequelae. Dr. Novak is trained in novel analytic and methodological approaches to the analysis of epidemiological and clinical data, including latent class models and propensity models of causal risk factors. He is developing and applying statistical approaches to the study of drug-related outcomes using hierarchical linear models (HLMs) and structural equation models with latent variables. Dr. Novak is currently the principal investigator on several NIH grants to examine substance use and psychiatric trajectories over the lifecourse. Prior to coming to RTI in 2004, he was on the faculty of Brown University in the Department of Community Health, and was a Robert Wood Johnson Faculty Fellow in the Department of Health Care Policy/Maternal and Child Health at Harvard University. Read More…

Biography
Corette B. Parker, DrPH, is a senior biostatistician who has worked at RTI from 1979 to 1991 and from 1997 to the present. Dr. Parker has considerable expertise in statistical methodology, analysis, and reporting and has published widely and collaboratively on health-related subjects in refereed journals. She has served in key coordinating center roles for large, multicenter studies of cardiovascular disease, HIV/AIDS, depression, and stillbirth, and she has directed groups of statisticians and programmers supporting such studies. Dr. Parker is involved in all aspects of the coordination of a study, including study design; development of a protocol, forms, and manuals of operations; design of enrollment and randomization systems and data collection and management components; study implementation and monitoring of data quality; interim and final data analysis and reporting; preparation of manuscripts for publication; and study closeout and documentation of the accumulated database. Read More…

Biography
Vijaya Rao, PhD, is a principal scientist with about 30 years of experience at RTI in the design and conduct of clinical trials and epidemiological studies. He directs data coordinating center projects and coordinates the development of protocols, study forms, and procedure manuals. He supervises and conducts statistical analyses of data. Dr. Rao has published in refereed journals. Read More…

Biography
Diane K. Wagener, PhD, has over 27 years of experience in academic and governmental institutions. She is the program manager of the Genomics and Statistical Genetics Program at RTI with expertise in designing and conducting epidemiologic studies and population-based surveys and analyzing data from a broad range of national data systems. These studies have involved the assessment of biological, behavioral, and environmental factors. Before joining RTI, she was the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services principal statistical advisor for the national health promotion and disease prevention initiative Healthy People. As director of the Division of Health Promotion Statistics at CDC and later in the Office of Public Health and Science of the Assistant Secretary of Health, Dr. Wagener coordinated the analyses of data from over 200 data systems to monitor national and state progress, inform policy decisions, and identify national data needs. Read More…

Biography
Dennis Wallace, PhD, joined RTI from Rho Federal Systems Division, Inc., where he was the principal investigator for statistical and clinical coordinating centers supporting research in infectious and autoimmune diseases. He specializes in the design and operation of clinical trials and the analysis of clinical trial data as well as data from environmental, epidemiological, and basic sciences studies. Dr. Wallace has provided statistical support and statistical leadership for clinical trials and epidemiologic studies of cardiovascular disease and stroke, clinical immunology, infectious diseases, substance abuse, developmental disabilities, geriatric medicine, sickle cell, and injury prevention. He has expertise in longitudinal and correlated data analysis and in linear and generalized linear models, with particular expertise in linear mixed models and the generalized estimating equation and nonlinear mixed model extensions of generalized linear models. He also has expertise in clinical trial design with emphasis on complex power calculations and on the design of cluster-randomized trials. Read More…

Biography
Edith G. Walsh, PhD, conducts health services research, building on 12 years of experience in administrative and clinical work serving Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries. Dr. Walsh's methodological expertise includes survey development and analysis, analysis of administrative data, and the use of qualitative methods to evaluate program implementation and the impact of new and existing programs on a range of stakeholders. Dr. Walsh is a nationally recognized expert on Medicare/Medicaid dual eligibles, on managed care and long-term care delivery systems, on health and functional status measurement for persons with chronic conditions and disabilities, and on the use of such measures to risk-adjust payments to managed care plans or as control variables or case mix measures in other types of analysis. She has recently begun examining complementary and alternative therapies and their potential to improve functional status. Read More…

Biography
Roy Whitmore, PhD, is a senior statistician who joined RTI in 1980. He is expert in design and analysis of complex sample surveys. His primary areas of application have been human exposure assessment surveys and postsecondary education studies. He recently was principal investigator for an EPA STAR grant that developed a data collection platform for human exposure-related behaviors, including time/activity/location/exertion-level data, dietary data, and data on use of consumer products. He was sampling task leader for such high-visibility EPA studies as the EPA Region 5 field test of the National Human Exposure Assessment Survey. He has served as task leader for sampling, weighting, imputation, and reporting for several postsecondary education surveys for the National Center for Education Statistics. He has published in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, Environmental Health Perspectives, Environmental Science and Technology, Atmospheric Environment, Journal of Official Statistics, and Journal of the American Statistical Association. Read More…

Biography
Timothy Wilcosky, PhD, senior epidemiologist, has a strong background in study design, statistical methods, and data analysis. His epidemiology experience spans more than 25 years and covers a variety of research areas. In addition to his general methodological skills, he has substantive expertise in cancer, cardiovascular disease, and other chronic diseases; tuberculosis and HIV infection; biological markers; occupational and environmental epidemiology; and clinical trials. While on the faculty in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health, he was an editor and contributor for the first book on biological markers written for epidemiologists. He joined RTI in 1990, where he has led or worked on numerous diverse projects. His published articles cover a variety of methodological and substantive topics. Read More…