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B&B Blurbs

By Elizabeth DeLong, PhD

Dear Alumni, Students, Staff, and Faculty, A lot has happened in our department over the past few years, and the end of the year is a nice time to summarize and reflect on how we’ve progressed as we prepare for the future. We hope you will enjoy this initial issue of B&B Blurbs and will find that it brings you up-to-date and helps you feel more connected with the department. Although we have several new initiatives to highlight, important things are also happening with respect to our ongoing activities. In particular, we have much to report on our graduate programs, our Biostatistics Core, and our administration. First, those of you who knew and loved Greg Samsa as DGS will be interested to know that he has transitioned to a completely different position. Greg now serves as the director of the Research Integrity office, and is responsible for the management of conflicts of interest within the School of Medicine. He is the first non-physician to serve in this capacity, and the hope is that his background as a statistician will also help to enhance the quality and reproducibility of biomedical research at Duke. Recognizing that the PhD and MB programs are too demanding for one person to serve as DGS for both, we now have a DGS for each. During this past summer, Megan Neely, PhD, took over as DGS for the MB program, which is now in its sixth year. As all of our current and previous students know, Megan is an enthusiastic and dedicated educator, and she has big plans for the program. She has even acquired some great artwork to decorate our student area, including professional photographs by our own Xiaofei Wang (if you haven’t seen them, they are a MUST). She has also convinced our education committee that we need to cater to potentially different academic trajectories to allow a student’s curriculum to be more tailored to their post-graduation goals. Beginning in Fall 2017, she is hoping to offer three academic tracks in the MB program: (1) Applied Biomedical Research (the current curriculum); (2) Mathematical Statistics (a new track designed to prepare students to enter a PhD program in statistics or biostatistics); and (3) Biomedical Data Science (a new track designed to prepare students to work with big biomedical data that is often messy and whose management and analysis often requires the use of multiple computing languages).

Fall 2016 Newsletter

Department of Biostatistics and

Bioinformatics

Leadership/

DGS Megan Neely (extreme right) and

other statisticians helping masters

students prepare for interviews.

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Huiman Barnhart, PhD, is now the DGS for the PhD program, and she is mak-ing sure that we have clear processes in place so that students know exactly what is expected of them. She has been supervising the student-run semi-nar, which is now open to others who may be interested in hearing the stu-dent presentations. She has also been counseling all three cohorts of PhD students regarding their anticipated career paths and thesis topics. Our first three students are well on their way to their preliminary orals and have ob-tained exciting affiliations. John Pura is working with Jichun Xie, PhD, on developing a novel multi-scale multiple testing procedure to identify rare events in flow cytometry data. He is being supported by a fellowship in Inte-grated Bioinformatics for Investigating and Engineering Microbiomes

(IBIEM). Fan Li is working with Andrew Allen, PhD, on estimating genetic effects under bi-ased sampling and has a research assistantship at the DCRI, where Nicole Soloman also has an assistantship. Nicole’s dissertation is with Sean O’Brien, PhD, and addresses probabilis-tic record linkage. Fan Li won the Student Travel Award for the 11th International Confer-ence on Health Policy Statistics (ICHPS) last year for presenting his master's thesis work. Our Biostatistics Core is expanding rapidly under the direction of Dr. Gina-Maria Po-mann. Members of the core are helping groups all over campus to develop their re-search infrastructure. Gina now directs 14 staff members and 13 master’s student in-terns. A major component of the core is the Biostatistics Core Training and Internship Pro-gram (BCTIP), which hires and trains MB stu-dents starting in their second semester. The program was developed by former students Samantha Thomas and Lauren Howard, along with other members of the core. The program provides a marvelous opportunity for our master’s students by giving them hands-on expe-riences working with medical investigators on actual problems. With so much going on, our excellent administrative staff has been stretched very thin. In particular, we have been doing a lot of hiring, much of it involving visa processing. Kim Hall has done a great job keeping up with all the paperwork and regulations. We will expand her responsibilities to include financial management, and we are happy to announce that she has been promoted to administrative manager. We will be hiring a human resources specialist to help her. We also hope to hire an additional staff assistant for the depart-ment. Our annual events are becoming more popular and widely attended. This year the Duke-Industry Statistical Symposium had as a theme “Precision Medicine in Cancer Research” and attracted over 250 attendees for short courses and the symposium from industry, gov-ernment, and academics all over the United States. Lisa LaVange, PhD, from CDER/FDA gave the keynote speech on “Precision Medicine Initiatives at FDA.” A number of B&B fac-ulty members attended, along with several of our students and a few of our previous stu-dents. It turned out to be a great venue for catching up with colleagues and keeping up with the field. The symposium next year will be held at Duke in October. We’re hoping many of our alumni will be able to attend.

DGS Huiman Barnhart celebrating

with the PhD students.

Gina-Maria Pomann (left front) with the staff and

student interns in the Biostatistics Core.

Jane Pendergast judging posters at the

Duke Industry Statistics Symposium.

B&B Blurbs I Fall 2016 Newsletter

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The B&B Annual Distinguished Lecturer this year was Andrew Gelman, PhD, from Columbia, who kept the audience entertained as well as in-formed. His first lecture drew a standing-room-only audience to hear about “The Statistical Crisis in Science,” which proved to be as provoca-tive as it sounds. The second lecture was less playful and called atten-tion to “Taking Bayesian Inference Seriously.” We have two relatively new ongoing initiatives that will interest you. Recognizing the need for more cohesive genetic/genomic activity at Duke, last year Dean Andrews created the Duke Center for Statistical Genetics and Genomics (StatGen; http://statgen.duke.edu/) and named

Andrew Allen as its director. Andrew’s first important step was to attract Shannon Clarke back to B&B to coordinate the activities of StatGen, which already has members from the entire Duke campus and several ongoing working groups that focus on the quantitative problems associated with genomic research. StatGen has joined a Duke-wide recruiting effort to attract up to seven new faculty members in the general areas of human genetics and quantitative sciences with plans to recruit two individuals di-rectly to StatGen. Additionally, StatGen is in the final stage of renovating space in MSRB I. In the coming month, several StatGen members, including Andrew, Jichun and Shannon, will relocate to this space. The new faculty recruits and several StatGen stu-dents will also join the team in MSRB I. To complete the medical research spectrum there is currently great hope not only for the promise of genetics and genomics, but also for leveraging the electronic health record (EHR). B&B has a growing core of faculty members who specialize in the field of biomedical informatics, and there are a large number of people with similar interests in other areas around Duke. We organized a social event to bring people together and are now meeting monthly with this larger group to stimulate collaborations and to help with the recruitment of additional faculty members to B&B. Additionally, the Duke Clinical and Translational Science Institute is building a “Big Data Core” (to be officially named later) under the guidance of Larry Carin, PhD, (engineering faculty), Michael Pencina, PhD, (B&B faculty), and Erich Huang, MD, PhD, (B&B faculty) that will provide the infrastructure for turning practical, burning health care questions into a domain where we can apply academic firepower to help solve them. Some exciting current work involves novel methods for use of EHR data to predict post-operative readmission, patient stratification in mental health, and biases in EHR data. Affiliated faculty also work in biomedical data standards, clinical decision support, data prove-nance, and mobile health, or “mHealth”.

B&B Blurbs I Fall 2016 Newsletter

This year’s distinguished lecturer,

Andrew Gelman, presenting to a

standing-room-only audience.

B&B Blurbs I Fall 2016 Newsletter

Be sure to check out our new website – it’s a great way to learn about events in the department: www.biostat.duke.edu. Sharon Updike is doing a great job tracking down recent accomplishments and events and making sure to highlight them on the web.

PLEASE LET US HEAR FROM YOU! We’d love to know what you’re doing and what events have taken place in your lives. In future issues we will include a section that reports on recent happenings such as weddings, births, promotions, new jobs, and maybe even new puppies. Contact me at elizabeth.delong@duke.edu. I send my very best wishes to you and yours for a wonderful holiday season. Sincerely,

Thanks for reading!

https://biostat.duke.edu/

Social event for Biomedical Informatics group.