Biostatistics and Epidemiology
Faculty and Staff
Heejung Bang, Ph.D., M.S., Associate Professor of Biostatistics in Public Health, received her MS and Ph.D. in Statistics from the North Carolina State University. She then completed a post-doctoral research fellowship in the Departments of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health. In 2001, she was a recipient of a young investigators award in the Statistics in Epidemiology Section at the Joint Statistical Meetings hosted by the American Statistical Association. Then she served as a faculty member at the Collaborative Studies Coordinating Center in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill for three years. At Weill Cornell Medical College, she is collaborating with clinical researchers in the fields of HIV/AIDS, kidney disease, diabetes, and heart disease. She has already published 65 articles (51 are peer-reviewed; 18 as first author). She teaches a course “Statistical methods for observational studies” at WCMC.
Dr. Bang’s work bridges theoretical and applied statistics by using statistical theory to develop research tools useful to applied biomedical researchers and clinicians. Her studies range from predicting kidney disease to medical cost estimation to the development of an index to quantify the completeness of blinding in clinical trials. Her contribution to the field of kidney disease screening has brought her a national and international reputation; her screening model was subsequently validated in independent samples and was shown to improve upon the current clinical practice guidelines endorsed by the National Kidney Foundation. A recently published study that she led draws attention to the important link between cardiovascular disease and chronic kidney disease and the need for screening and treatment of CKD in CVD patients. ( Nephrol Dial Transplant. 2009 Mar 26) Her methodological contributions to the analysis of medical cost and assessment of blinding in clinical trials are also of great value. The Bang & Tsiatis estimator (2000) for censored medical cost is the first unbiased estimator in the literature. Bang et al.’s Blinding Index (2004) provides a method for making a numerical assessment of the success of blinding in a clinical trial. This index is now incorporated into the popularly used statistical software STATA. Dr. Bang served as Principal Investigator, co-Principal Investigator, or co-Investigator on multiple grants including R01 HL096575-01 with the title of ‘A unified approach for cost-effectiveness analysis’; her research is reflected in a prolific publication record in diverse fields. She is the Editor of the book ‘Statistical Methods in Molecular Biology’ (Humana Press, to be published in 2010). Her methodological research topics include:
- Medical cost and other censored data (Biometrika 2000; Biometrics 2002; J Int Marketing 2005; Contemp Clin Trials 2005; Stat in Med 2007)
- Blinding and noncompliance in clinical trials (Controlled Clin Trials 2004, 2005; Stat in Med 2007. NOTE: Blinding Index is built in Stata)
- Multiple testing, Sample size calculation, Microarray (Biostatistics 2005; Science 2004; J Biopharm Stat 2005)
- Causal inference and nonrandomized treatment (Biometrics 2005; Stat in Med 2008)
- Biostatistics tutorial (Neuroepidemiology 2006)
- Disease prediction models (in kidney disease and diabetes, see below)
- HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases (J of AIDS 2002; AIDS 2002; Biostatistics 2002; J Infect Dis 2007; Clin Infect Dis 2007)
- Cardiovascular disease (Circulation 2004; Am J Med 2005; Arch Int Med 2005; Am J Cardiology 2008; Ann Epi 2008)
- Diabetes (Diabetes 2004; Diabetes Care 2005; Diabetologia 2007)
- Kidney disease (Am J Kid Dis 2005; Arch Int Med 2007, 2008)
- Neurology (Stroke 2005; Neurology 2006, 2007; Atherosclerosis 2008)
- OB-GYN (JCEM 2006; Fertility and Sterility 2006; Oncologist 2007)
- Prevention science (Addictive Behaviors 2007; Prev Sci 2007)
- Meta-analysis (J Family Pract 2007; STD 2007)
