Department Faculty

Faculty and Staff pose at the Fall 2018 Orientation
Faculty and Staff at the Fall 2018 Orientation (Ao Yuan, Hongbin Fang, James Li, Jaeil Ahn, Christopher Loffredo, Simina Boca; Minnie An, Kepher Makambi, Ming Tan, Valeriy Korostyshevskiy, XZ, Ruzong Fan, Robert Beckman, Veronica Chiu)

Department Faculty


Our faculty are leaders in their fields with a wealth of research experience in both academia and industry. They are dedicated to pursuing cutting-edge discoveries as well as teaching and fostering the next generation in their scientific pursuits. They have a motto of “Research. Teach. Service.”

Primary Appointment

Jaeil Ahn, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Biostatistics
ja1030@georgetown.edu | Basic Science, Rm 255

Research Interests: tumor heterogeneity problems based on gen sequencing data, gene-environment interaction, case control studies and sampling designs, hierarchical Bayesian and longitudinal dyadic data models

Ruzong Fan, Ph.D.

Professor, Biostatistics
rf740@georgetown.edu | Building D, Rm 103

Research Interests: statistical and mathematical analysis of complex genetic and genomic data, biological architecture of complex diseases

Hongbin Fang, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Biostatistics
hf183@georgetown.edu | Basic Science, Rm 205

Research Interests: statistical design and analysis of laboratory, translational, clinical, and epidemiological studies in cancer research

Valeriy R. Korostyshevskiy, Ph.D.

Professor, Biostatistics
Director, MS Graduate Studies
vrk@georgetown.edu | Building D, Ste 180

Research Interests: nonlinear differential equations applied to metabolic pathway analysis, biomedical image analysis, robust computation for big data sets

James Li, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Biostatistics
xl35@georgetown.edu | Building D, Ste 180

Research Interests: Novel Machine Learning/Deep Learning/AI algorithms and their applications as well as DevOps for bioinformatics, healthcare, NLP & other fields

George Luta, Ph.D.

Professor, Biostatistics
gl77@georgetown.edu | Building D, Rm 182

Research Interests: development of empirical likelihood-based statistical methods for the analysis of data from clinical trials and observational studies

Kepher Makambi, Ph.D.

Professor, Biostatistics
khm33@georgetown.edu | Building D, Ste 180

Research Interests: meta-analysis, adaptive design methods in clinical trials, structural equation modeling, statistical methods in epidemiology, and application of complex survey methods

Ming T. Tan, Ph.D.

Professor & Chair, Biostatistics
Director, Ph.D. Graduate Studies
mtt34@georgetown.edu | Building D, Ste 180

Research Interests: statistical methods for searching and evaluating multi-drug combinations utilizing both experimental data and system biology, innovative methods to optimally design and efficiently analyze pre-clinical drug combination therapies in cancer by integrating concepts in modern statistical and number-theoretic methods and pharmacology; and high dimensional genomics data analysis in Cancer Epidemiology

Hongkun Wang, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Biostatistics
hw87@georgetown.edu | Building D, Rm 397

Research Interests: survival analysis, quality-adjusted lifetime analysis with censored data, cost-effectiveness analysis with censored data, and design and analysis of clinical trials

Ao Yuan, Ph.D.

Professor, Biostatistics
ay312@georgetown.edu | Research, Rm W210

Research Interests: Biostatistics, non-semi-and-parametric methods, clinical trials, causal inference, statistical genetics and Bayesian methods

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Secondary Appointment

Robert A. Beckman, M.D.

Professor, Oncology
rab302@georgetown.edu

Research Interests: developing cancer therapies and to improve the way cancer therapies are developed and deployed in patients, with emphasis on personalized medicine, tumor heterogeneity, and tumor evolution


Simina M. Boca, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, ICBI
smb310@georgetown.edu

Research Interests: development of methods and tools for the analysis of “omics” data, including genomics and metabolomics, and downstream application in precision medicine; cancer epidemiology and population genetics

Chiranjeev Dash, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Oncology
Assistant Director of Health Disparities Research
cd422@georgetown.edu

Research Interests: design, implementation, and analysis of epidemiologic studies; molecular epidemiology and cancer prevention and control in minorities and underserved populations

Anca Dragomir, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Oncology
ad576@georgetown.edu

Research Interests: epidemiology of colorectal and other gastrointestinal cancers, and also environmental exposures related to childhood cancers

Ophir Frieder, Ph.D.

Professor, Computer Science
of22@georgetown.edu

Research Interests: information retrieval, medical informatics, & communication systems

Christopher A. Loffredo, Ph.D.

Professor, Oncology
Program Leader, Cancer Prevention and Control
cal9@georgetown.edu

Research Interests: environmental and genetic causes of cancer and birth defects, and especially on the roles that genetics play in mediating the risks from environmental chemical exposures; research spans liver, bladder, and lung cancer in relation to chronic infections such as HCV, and environmental factors such as smoking and secondhand smoke

Michael W. Plankey

Professor, Medicine
mwp23@georgetown.edu

Research Interests: methodological approaches to analyze complex longitudinal data related to the syndemic production of social, psychological and behavioral risk factors and HIV health outcomes among sexual minority and race/ethnicity minority men and women

Rochelle E. Tractenberg, Ph.D.

Professor, Neurology
Rehabilitation Medicine Director, Collaborative for Research on Outcomes and Metrics
ret7@georgetown.edu

Research Interests: statistical methodology and statistical literacy for effective stewardship of the discipline in PhD students/holders; higher education curriculum building and evaluation; neuropsychological assessment; the development and benchmarking of outcomes; experimental design; and longitudinal (latent variable) analytic methods

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Adjunct Appointment

Jessica Kim, Ph.D.

GUMC Adjunct, Associate Professor

Research Interests: adaptive design in bioequivalence studies, identifying influential observations, detecting vs ruling out safety endpoints, use of tolerance interval method in evaluation of blood products, disease risk score

George Kordzakhia, Ph.D.

GUMC Adjunct, Associate Professor
gk556@georgetown.edu

Research Interests: stochastic processes of competition and predator-prey interactions, gatekeeping multiple testing procedures in clinical trials, type I error rate control in adaptive design trials

Aiyi Liu, Ph.D.

GUMC Adjunct, Professor
al1029@georgetown.edu

Research Interests: sequential and adaptive methods in clinical trials and biomedical research, multivariate data analysis and related topics, statistical methodology for diagnostic biomarkers (ROC curve analysis; methods for pooled biospecimens; evaluation of measurement errors; limit of detection and left truncation), semiparametric and nonparametric methods for multidimensional data, genome-wide association studies, group testing methodology, precision medicine and prediction, methods for semicontinuous data analysis

Semhar Ogbagaber, Ph.D.

GUMC Adjunct, Assistant Professor
so513@georgetown.edu

Research Interests: personalized medicine – development of statistical methods for testing dynamic treatment regimes through sequentially randomized designs, growth models (non-linear models), survival analysis, statistical methods in psychiatric clinical trials

Lockwood G. Taylor, Ph.D.

GUMC Adjunct, Assistant Professor
lgt9@georgetown.edu

Colin O. Wu, Ph.D.

GUMC Adjunct, Professor
cow6@georgetown.edu

Research Interests: statistical analysis for repeated measurements and longitudinal data, statistical methods for clinical trials and observational studies, estimation and inferences in semiparametric and nonparametric models, biased sampling models, survival analysis, statistical modeling in genetic epidemiology, statistical applications in cardiovascular and blood diseases

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