Quick Bio

I joined the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Department of Public Health Sciences in 2010 as an assistant professor. I graduated in 1995 from Rice University with a degree in chemistry and anthropology and worked briefly as a petroleum engineer. I completed a master's degree in environmental chemistry from University of North Carolina at Wilmington in 2000. While working as a research chemist, I was exposed to the power of statistics in conducting more efficient experiments and thus I returned to school in 2005. In 2010 I graduated from MUSC with a PH.D. in biostatistics.

Research Interest

My research interests focus on biostatistics applications in data mining and exploration. Much of my work focuses on identifying high-order interactions among biological markers predictive of disease outcome. My most recent work has been in ensemble adaptations of logic regression to improve identification of high-order interactions among binary variables predictive of a binary outcome with specific application in breast cancer, periodontal disease, systemic lupus erythmatosus, and cystic fibrosis. Software packages are available at CRAN (see Logic Forest and OrdLogReg).

Much of my time is spent collaborating with various clinicians and basic science researchers across the MUSC campus as I am one of a group of statisticians working in the Biostatistics Core of MUSC's South Carolina Clinical and Translation Institute(SCTR). Exposure to a broad number of clinical and scientific questions continues to foster my interest in developing new methodology to analyze complex data sets.