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Biostatistics Research in Public Health

SPH Research in Biostatistics
17
Jul

What Is Biostatistics?

Researchers in biostatistics at the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health help drive and clarify the school’s research by applying and developing statistics methods to better understand public health.

Advanced biostatistics is essential to analyze complex and big data – or huge amounts of data in healthcare and other fields – and reveal and quantify the possible effects of health interventions on individuals, groups and populations. A sound analysis by biostatisticians has become even more important as the public and policymakers try to understand the effects of health reform initiatives, and as public health and health care systems increasingly use electronic health records, population-based health surveys and large scale community-based interventions.

Our biostatistics faculty are experts in Bayesian analysis, survival analysis, categorical data analysis, complex sampling/clinical trial design, statistical genetics, and machine learning and big data, among other areas. They collaborate with other scientists at OHSU in highly diverse projects such as clinical and community-based intervention studies, laboratory experiments and observational studies. We collaborate with School of Public Health investigators to select the most appropriate study design and analysis methods to align with the research questions they’re trying to answer.

Biostatistics faculty members contribute to groundbreaking research at the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute, the Oregon Clinical and Translational Research Institute, the Center for Health Research at Kaiser Permanente and epidemiology and health services research groups within the School of Public Health.

The OHSU-PSU School of Public Health is home to the Biostatistics & Design Program (BDP), an OHSU Research Core dedicated to providing high quality biostatistics collaboration, with particular expertise in population science. Several of our Biostatistics faculty are involved in the BDP, as are a number of masters and PhD level staff biostatisticians. Internships for students enrolled in the Biostatistics programs (MS, MPH and Graduate Certificate) are possible through BDP.