About
Designing studies that advance clinical and translational research (CTR) requires statistical thinking since information obtainable from populations on questions of interest is invariably incomplete. Likewise, the monitoring and analysis of CTR studies involve data-scientific contributions from statistical and computational sciences, owing to the magnitude, complexity, and multimodality of contemporary data resources, as well as to research requirements of rigor, reproducibility, and transparency.
The Biomedical Data Science Program integrates core research support services, training activities, and methodological research. We do consulting, collaboration, research, and training in biomedical data science, which we interpret broadly as a contemporary synthesis of computational and statistical sciences applied in health and biomedical research. We partner with the Informatics Data Science program to bring the full spectrum of data scientific tools and expertise to CTR.
Core services
Central to the Biomedical Data Science Program is a collection of related core services that operate throughout the School of Medicine and Public Health (SMPH), ICTR, the Carbone Cancer Center (UWCCC), the Waisman Center, the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC), and through multi-investigator SPORE and P01 projects within UWCCC. These core services involve faculty and staff members from the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics (BMI) and affiliated units; the separate services are connected in varying degrees through the sharing of operational infrastructure and staff expertise.
Refer to the Services section below for the ICTR-specific services offered to investigators under the BERD umbrella (Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design). The Biomedical Data Science program connects BERD with the following core services provided through BMI.
- Biostatistics Shared Resource (BSR; UWCCC)
- Cancer Informatics Shared Resource (CISR; UWCCC)
- Waisman Center Data Science Core
- Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Core: Immunomodulatory Targeted Radionuclide Therapy
- Biostatistics and Informatics Core: Head & Neck Cancer SPORE
- Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Core: Prostate SPORE
- Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center: Data Management and Biostatistics Core
Training
Faculty engaged in the above core service operations are active trainers. Prominent among the training activities are the Biomedical Data Science MS/PhD programs and the ICTR Graduate Programs in Clinical Investigation.
Research: Areas of faculty/staff expertise
- Expertise with collaborative teams: bringing special expertise, biostatisticians, bioinformaticians, and other data scientists work with domain experts in team projects
- Expertise with many study types: preclinical studies, clinical trials (all phases), health services, population-based, observational studies, randomized trials, genetic epidemiology, spatial epidemiology, quasi-experimental
- Experience with many data types: multi-omic data; biomedical imaging data; clinical records; sensor data; patient-reported outcomes; …from molecules to cells to tissues to brain networks to microbiomes to study participants to cohorts and populations
- Expertise in important methodologies: exploratory data analysis, statistical inference, likelihood methods, nonparametric methods, survival analysis, generalized linear models, hypothesis testing, predictive modeling, causal inference, phenotyping, Bayesian analysis, simulation, bioinformatic pipelines, data integration, personalized treatment rules, imputation, covariate matching, machine learning, natural language processing, large-language models
