Medical University

of South Carolina

Hollings Cancer Center at MUSC

Biostatistics Shared Resource

at Hollings Cancer Center

Department of Biostatistics, Bioinformatics, & Epidemiology at

MUSC

I was born in 1972 in Ocean City, New Jersey.  I spent my childhood in Ocean City and attended all of Ocean City's public schools.  In 1990, I began my college education at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.  I graduated summa cum laude from Bowdoin in 1994, and soon after began my graduate studies in Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.  I spent 5.5 years in the PhD program with Scott Zeger as my thesis advisor, finishing my dissertation in February of 2000.

In February 2000, I joined the Division of Biostatistics in the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University.  I split my time between working on bioinformatics projects (mostly microarray data analysis and methods development) and clinical trials research.  My primary mentors were Giovanni Parmigiani and Steven Piantadosi.  During my seven years at Hopkins, I was involved with dozens of grant proposals and was a co-author on over 90 peer-reviewed publications.  In 2003, I co-edited a book with Giovanni Parmigiani, Rafael Irizarry and Scott Zeger on methods and software for gene expression array analysis.  Over my seven years on the faculty at Hopkins, I served on 16 dissertation committees, 39 dissertation proposal oral exams, and advised two master's theses and one PhD thesis.  I spent a good deal of time teaching, including a one semester course entitled "Statistics for Psychosocial Research" focusing on measurement, reliability, validity, and structural modeling.  From 2000 to 2006, I was a member of the Clinical Review Committee for the Cancer Center, and served as chair of the committee during 2006. 

In February 2007, I became Director of Biostatistics for the Hollings Cancer Center at the Medical University of South Carolina at the level of Associate Professor.   Currently, I am working on clinical trials and basic science projects with the Cancer Center faculty and growing the biostatistics division to support a broad range of cancer research.  Our short term goal is to obtain NCI designation.  We will submit a grant to achieve this in June 2008. 

I currently live in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina with my husband (Jeff), our two-year old son (Garrett), and our two dogs (Luke and Wilma).