Biostatistics Shared Resource

Faculty and Staff

Ming Tan, PhD, is director and a faculty member of  BSR. He is a tenured Professor in the Departments of Biostatistics, Bioinformatics and Biomathematics (DBBB). Dr. Tan has over 30 years experience in the design, monitoring and analysis of clinical trials and predictive modeling and big data. His over 200 publications split about evenly between biomedicine (such as NEJM, Lancet, Nature, and JCO) and biostatistics/bioinformatics such as Biometrics, Statistics in Medicine, BMC Bioinformatics, J Comp Biol, Systems Biology. He has over 230 peer-reviewed publications; and has been biostatistics Co-Investigators on many research grants and the principal investigator on multiple NIH grants. Dr. Tan oversees BSR operations and is responsible for defining the scientific and financial goals of the BSR and worked directly with the Cancer Center and Medical Center administrations to ensure their implementation. Dr. Tan, as a faculty member in BBSR, also works with other LCCC investigators as team scientist on multiple research projects.

George Luta, PhD, is Assistant Director and a faculty member of BSR. Dr. Luta is a tenured professor in the DBBB. Dr. Luta advises investigators on statistical methodology and its applications to observational studies and randomized clinical trials. He has more than 22 years of experience as a biostatistician, including seven years at University of North Carolina School of Medicine as a project statistician for a large epidemiological study and its related substudies prior to joining the faculty at Georgetown in 2007. His collaborative and independent research work has resulted in more than 100 peer-reviewed publications. Other research interests include empirical likelihood-based covariate adjustment methods, adaptive designs methodology and statistical methods for flow cytometry data. Dr. Luta is responsible for collaborating with LCCC members in providing statistical support for research. He also prepares necessary reports, provides quality assurance and is a LCCC Cancer Prevention and Control (CPC) Program member.

Kepher Makambi, PhD, is a faculty member of BSR.  Dr. Makambi is a tenured associate professor of biostatistics. Prior to joining Georgetown, he was a tenure track assistant professor of medicine (biostatistics) at Howard University and director of the Biostatistics Core at Howard University Cancer Center. Dr. Makambi has many years of collaborative experience in the design and analysis of community intervention trials, behavioral studies, epidemiological studies and basic science studies plus proteomics and glycomics. He serves on multiple NIH scientific review committees. He is a statistical reviewer for the Journal of the National Cancer Institute and serves on the editorial boards of the Annals of Biometrics & Biostatistics and the International Journal of Molecular Epidemiology and Genetics. Dr. Makambi advises investigators on the development of statistical methods for meta-analysis in epidemiology and clinical trials. Other research interests include adaptive design methods in clinical trials, structural equation modeling, statistical methods in epidemiology and the application of complex survey methods. Dr. Makambi is responsible for collaborating with LCCC members in providing statistical support for research. He is currently working on health disparity research at the Capital Breast Care Center. Dr. Makambi prepares necessary reports and provides quality assurance. He also is a member of the PRMC and the DSMC and primarily supports the CPC.

Jaeil Ahn, PhD, is a faculty member of the BSR. Dr. Ahn earned his PhD in biostatistics from the University of Michigan in 2011 with a dissertation titled “Bayesian Modeling of Epidemiologic Data Under Complex Sampling Schemes.” He joined Georgetown and the BSR after a postdoctoral research fellowship in biostatistics and bioinformatics at University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He has been serving on the PRMC since 2014. He collaborates in head and neck cancers and HCC with, for example, Goldman (CPC; U01 CA168926) on identifying biomarkers related to glycosylation that help indicate changes in the glycosylation of kinininogen and thus develop a model-based algorithm for the early detection of HCC. He is currently co-PI of R01 CA183793, “Statistical Methods for Genomic Analysis of Heterogeneous Tumors,” working with TCGA.

Hongbin Fang, PhD, is a faculty member of BSR. Dr. Fang is a tenured associate professor of biostatistics. Prior to joining Georgetown in 2013, he 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. He received his PhD in 1998 and conducted postdoctoral research in biostatistics at the University of Missouri–Columbia and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Dr. Fang is responsible for collaborating with LCCC members in providing statistical support for research. He advises investigators on the statistical design and analysis of clinical trials plus develops methods for designing and analyzing cancer therapies with multiple drugs and immunotherapy. 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/multilevel modeling; and applied Bayesian methods.

Valeriy R. Korostyshevskiy, PhD, is a faculty member of BSR. Dr. Korostyshevskiy is an associate professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics. His research interests include nonlinear differential equations applied to metabolic pathway analysis, biomedical image analysis and robust computations for big data sets. He works in computational biology, focusing on computational and statistical analysis of two-dimensional biomedical data with applications in proteomics and metabolomics. Other research interests include developing computational methods for flow cytometry and algorithms for robust statistical calculations. Dr. Korostyshevskiy is responsible for collaborating with LCCC members in providing statistical support for research. He is a member of the DSMC, prepares necessary reports, provides quality assurance and is a LCCC Molecular Oncology (MO) Program member.

Ruzong Fan, PhD, is a faculty member of BSR. Dr. Fan is a professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics. He came to Georgetown from the NIH, specializing in statistical genetics and genomics analysis. He works on developing and applying statistical methodology for the genetic analysis of complex traits. His research topics include functional regression models for gene-level association analysis, gene–gene and gene–environment interactions, longitudinal/multivariate phenotypic trait analysis, association study in the presence of measurement errors for environmental factors, combined linkage and association mapping of complex diseases and statistical methods to detect positive selection in genome-wide scans. He has developed R packages, SAS macros and C++ programs. He is developing a functional regression model for gene-based association analysis of complex traits (i.e., survival, quantitative and dichotomous traits) for rare variants to analyze patients and their variants from the Consortium of Investigators of Modifiers of BRCA1/2, in which the LCCC is a part (Isaacs [BC]). In addition, he has developed stochastic dynamic models with application to bioinformatics data. His research on stochastic modeling is motivated by longitudinal studies of biomedical research with applications to either genetic or non-genetic data.

James Xin Li, PhD, is a faculty member of BSR.  Dr. Li is associate professor in the DBBB and has been with BSR since 2013. Joining Georgetown in May 2006, Li has broad experience in bioinformatics and machine learning and can proficiently use a variety of programming languages and software tools to analyze high-throughput omics data, including gene expression microarrays, miRNA, genome-wide association studies, DNA methylation, metabolomics and pathway analysis. He supports multiple investigators from different programs in genomics analysis and pathway analysis through interaction with the GESR. His expertise has been used to support multiple projects involving genomics and EHRs.

Hongkun Wang, is a faculty member of BSR. Dr. Wang is a tenured associate professor at DBBB. She advises investigators on the design and analysis of clinical trials and statistical methodology. Other research interests include the design and analysis of clinical trials, survival analysis, statistical methods for medical cost and cost-effectiveness analysis with censored data and quality-adjusted lifetime analysis. Dr. Wang is responsible for collaborating with LCCC members in providing statistical support for research. Dr. Wang also is director of clinical biostatistics in the BBSR and the DBBB. She has established an excellent working relationship with the CRMO to enhance communication and data availability as trials are ongoing. She is a member of the PRMC.

Ao Yuan, PhD, is a faculty member of BSR. Dr. Yuan is an associate professor of biostatistics. Prior to joining Georgetown in 2014, Dr. Yuan worked at Howard University National Human Genome Center as a research biostatistician (1999-2013), at Massachusetts General Hospital as a biostatistics research fellow (1997-1999) after receiving Ph.D. in statistics from University of British Columbia, 1997. Dr. Yuan has expertise in clinical trial methodology, randomization, Bayesian and semi-parametric modeling of cross sectional and longitudinal data for robust inference, predictive and prognostic models of cancer and statistical genetics. He has been Co-Investigator and PI of multiple NIH studies and collaborated with multiple GUMC investigators.

Key Staff

Minnie An, MS, is the acting administrator of the BSR. Ms. An provides project management and billing for the BSR and serves as a contact for the core.  Ms. An has over 6 years of experience working with BSR.

Xue Geng, MS, is a staff biostatistician of BSR. Ms. Geng is the primary MS statistician for statistical analysis of many projects ranging from translational to clinical and population studies, and has co-authored on many collaborative publications. Ms. Geng also provides assistance for study designs working with faculty members of BSR.

Benefits and Opportunities of Working Within the Shared Resources

In addition to the many benefits offered to all Georgetown University employees, there are a number of benefits specific to staff of the Shared Resources. Shared Resource directors will work with staff to develop a plan for continuing education and training. Opportunities offered will depend on the workload of the shared resource and the availability of resources but the Shared Resource director will make every effort to ensure that staff receive the education and training needed to move their career along.