2019 Faculty Promotions

Posted in DBBB Stories News  |  Tagged , ,

(July 30, 2019) – The Department is happy to congratulate it’s faculty members who received promotions this academic year.

Hongbin Fang, Ph.D. granted Tenure

Hongbin Fang, Ph.D., was granted tenure as an Associate Professor of Biostatistics. Before joining Georgetown University in 2013, Dr. Hongbin Fang was an Associate Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Maryland Greenebaum Cancer Center and the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.  Dr. Fang received his Ph.D. degree from Hong Kong Baptist University. 

Dr. Fang has extensive collaborative research experience in the statistical design and analysis of laboratory, translational, clinical and epidemiological studies in cancer research.  His statistical expertise includes the design and analysis of preclinical models and clinical trials, the evaluation of diagnostic tests, biomarkers and drug combinations, survival analysis, the analysis of high dimensional genomic data and statistical bioinformatics, predictive and prognostic models of cancer, longitudinal and Bayesian hierarchical/multi-level modeling and applied Bayesian methods. 


James Li, Ph.D. promoted to Associate Professor

James Li, Ph.D, was promoted to Associate Professor.  Dr. Li received his Ph.D. in Information Systems from University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and joined the departmental faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2012.  Dr. Li focuses his research on machine learning, data science, and their applications on ultra-high throughput biomedical research data.


George Luta, Ph.D. promoted to Full Professor

George Luta, Ph.D., was promoted from Associate Professor to Full Professor of Biostatistics. Dr. Luta received his MS and PhD in Biostatistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Luta has been with the Department since 2007. His current honorary appointments include being a Visiting Professor in the Department of Clinical Epidemiology at Aarhus University (Aarhus, Denmark) and a Visiting Professor at the Parker Institute (Copenhagen University Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark). Dr. Luta is an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute. He has more than 20 years of experience in the design and statistical analysis of observational studies and randomized controlled trials. His current methodological research work is focused on the development of new statistical methods for measures of health disparities.


Anca Dragomir, Ph.D. promoted to Associate Professor

Anca Dragomir, Ph.D., was promoted from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor of Oncology and she has a secondary appointment in Biostatistics.  Dr. Dragomir has a Ph.D. degree in Epidemiology from the Gillings School of Global Public Health, UNC at Chapel Hill and a graduate degree in Mathematics from University of Timisoara, Romania.  Dr. Dragomir’s current research focuses on the epidemiology of colorectal and other gastrointestinal cancers, and also environmental exposures related to childhood cancers.  She has more than fifteen years of work experience as an epidemiologist, including subject recruitment, questionnaire design, data collection, biospecimen collection/storage, biomarker measurement and evaluation, epidemiological analyses, and manuscript preparation.


Michael Plankey, Ph.D. promoted to Full Professor

Michael Plankey, Ph.D., was promoted from Associate Professor to Full Professor of Medicine and he has a secondary appointment in Biostatistics.  He is a clinical infectious disease and nutritional epidemiologist.  He is the Co-Investigator for Baltimore-Washington, DC site of the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS) in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Washington, DC Consortium of the Women’s Interagency HIV Study (WIHS) at Georgetown University. He serves as the sole primary investigator funded by both cohorts.