2024 Faculty lightning talks

Posted by cullum1 on Tuesday, August 20, 2024 in News.

Each year, members of our faculty participate in lightning talks as an opportunity to share their research interests, current projects, and potential collaboration opportunities with students in our graduate program. These presentations help students explore different avenues of investigation and brainstorm potential projects that can contribute to their theses or dissertations.

Here are the faculty members who participated in the 2024 talks and their current research focuses:

Jonathan Schildcrout

• Randomized controlled trials (RCT)
• Observational study data
• Current project: Greenlight Plus study
  • Control: designed to promote healthy growth through a low-health literacy toolkit to enhance pediatric primary care
  • Intervention: automated text messaging that reinforces goals around health behaviors
  • Primary analysis: longitudinal mixed model that compares average growth trajectories
• Contact jonny.schild@vumc.org 

Bryan Shepherd

• Rank-based analysis methods and applications
• Statistical methods research
• Computing skills
• Applications to biomedical studies, particularly HIV/AIDS and other global health diseases
• Looking for a PhD student to help with research for the summer/fall
• Contact bryan.shepherd@vumc.org

Jinyuan Liu

• Distance-based model for high-dimenstional data
• Robust semiparametric model
• Longitudinal data with missingness
• Causal and causal mediation
• Semiparametric efficiency theory
• Applications in:
  • Mental health (psychometrics, neuroimaging)
  • mHealth (wearables)
  • Omics (microbiome, etc.)
• Contact jinyuan.liu@vumc.org

Bryan Blette

• Clinical trials
• Cluster-randomized trials
• Causal inference
• Missing data and measurement error
• Collaborative work in infectious disease and respiratory/critical care medicine
• Potential MS thesis project: use simulation studies to illustrate weaknesses of “responder analysis”
• Potential PhD dissertation focus: working with missing data in a study for phenotyping ARDS, pneumonia, and sepsis (APS)
• Contact bryan.blette@vumc.org 

Amber Hackstadt

• Diabetes research
• Electronic Health Records (EHR)
• Electronic interventions providing feedback to patients and providers
• Time-to-event
• Bayesian approach
• Data-driven approaches (xgboost, regression trees)
• Summer project: explore a statistical method and apply it to EHR data set
• No help needed on current collaborations, but possibility for new opportunities in 2025
• Contact amber.hackstadt@vumc.org

Gustavo Amorim

• Missing data
• Inverse probability weighting (IPW)
• Augmented inverse probability weighting (AIPW)
• Generalized raking estimators
• Influence functions
• Programming (e.g., simulation studies, R packages like survey/aipw)
• Opportunity for summer project with manuscript submitted to a statistics/epidemiology journal
• Contact gustavo.g.amorim@vumc.org

Tags: collaboration, lightning talks, projects, research