Biostatistics Branch Fellows

Samsiddi Bhattacharjee - Research Fellow

Samsiddhi Bhattacharjee joined the Biostatistics Branch in the Fall of 2008 as a Research Fellow. His primary mentor is Dr. Nilanjan Chatterjee, Chief, Biostatistics Branch and Senior investigator, in the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics. Dr. Bhattacharjee’s research interests include family-based linkage and association mapping of quantitative traits, ascertained sampling, genome-wide association studies, and population stratification. His current research focuses on the role of gene-gene interactions in prostrate cancer and also identification of genetic pathways involved in common cancers. Dr. Bhattacharjee received his Ph.D. from the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh, working on score statistics for mapping of quantitative traits. Prior to that, he received a master’s degree in Statistics from the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata, India.

Key Publications:

• • Bhattacharjee S, Kuo CL, Mukhopadhyay NM, Brock GN, Weeks DE , Feingold EF: Robust score statistics for QTL linkage analysis. Am J Hum Genet 2008 Mar;82(3):567-582.
• • Sengul H, Bhattacharjee S, Feingold E, Weeks DE: The elusive goal of pedigree weights. Genet Epidemiol. 2007 Jan;31(1):51-65.
• • Nandita Mukhopadhyay, Indrani Halder, Samsiddhi Bhattacharjee, Daniel E. Weeks: Two-dimensional linkage analyses of rheumatoid arthritis. BMC Proceedings, 2007 Dec; I (Suppl I):568.

Julia Ciampa - Predoctoral Fellow

Julia Ciampa joined the Biostatistics Branch in the Fall of 2007 under the auspices of the NIH-Oxford-Cambridge Graduate Partnerships Program. She is currently researching methods to detect susceptibility SNPs in the presence of genetic interactions, using case-control data, with applications to prostate cancer GWAS. Miss Ciampa will conduct research at both NCI and Oxford, where she is enrolled as a D.Phil. student in the Department of Statistics. Her mentors are Drs. Nilanjan Chatterjee, Chief and Senior Investigator, Biostatistics Branch, Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics and Chris Holmes, Professor, Oxford Centre for Gene Function. She earned a M.Sc., with Distinction, in Applied Statistics from Oxford in 2007, completing her thesis on discriminant analysis at the Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain. Miss Ciampa graduated Cum Laude from Harvard College in 2004 with an AB in History and Statistics. She is currently on leave from the University of Massachusetts Medical School where she will earn her M.D.

Key Publications:

• • Goldberg RJ, Ciampa J, Lessard D, Meyer TE, Spencer FA. Long-term survival after heart failure: a contemporary population-based perspective. Arch Intern Med. 2007 Mar 12;167(5):490-6.
• • Miller KK, Grinspoon SK, Ciampa J, Hier J, Herzog D, Klibanski A. Medical findings in outpatients with anorexia nervosa. Arch Intern Med. 2005 Mar 14; 165(5):561-6.
• • Miller KK, Grinspoon S, Gleysteen S, Grieco KA, Ciampa J, Breu J, Herzog DB, Klibanski A. Preservation of neuroendocrine control of reproductive function despite severe undernutrition. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2004 Sep; 89(9):4434-8.

Sonya Heltshe - Postdoctoral Fellow

Sonya Heltshe joined the Biostatistics Branch as a postdoctoral fellow in April of 2008. She is working with mentors Drs. Barry Graubard and Jay Lubin, both Senior Investigators, in the Biostatistics Branch, Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, in addition to other collaborators, on imputation and prediction error methods in registry datasets and exposure assessment in epidemiological studies. Her other statistical interests are spatial smoothing techniques and environmental exposure problems. She received her Ph.D. in Biostatistics at the University of Colorado Health Science Center in 2007 with a dissertation that modeled cancer courses for the purpose of quantifying length bias in screening trials.

Huilin Li - Research Fellow

Dr. Li received her Ph.D. in statistics from University of Maryland, College Park in 2007 and came to the Biostatistics Branch in November of 2007. Her primary mentor is Dr. Mitchell Gail, M.D., Senior Investigator and former Chief of the Biostatistics Branch (BB), Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics (DCEG). Her primary research interests are in: disease mapping, empirical Bayes inference, multi-level models, resampling methods, small area estimation, statistical methods for genetic association studies, and survey sampling.
Currently she is working with Dr. Barry Graubard, Senior Investigator, BB, DCEG and Dr. Gail on covariate adjustment and ranking methods to identify regions with high and low mortality rates. Dr. Li is also working on a project with Drs. Gail and Nilanjan Chatterjee, Chief of BB, and Senior Investigator, where they are using cases from genome-wide association studies to strengthen influence on association between single nucleotide polymorphisms and other phenotypes.

Key Publications:

• • Chatterjee, S., Lahiri, P., and Li, Huilin (2008). Parametric bootstrap approximation to the distribution of EBLUP and related prediction intervals in linear mixed models. The Annals of Statistics, Vol. 36, No. 3, 1221-1245.

Qizhai Li - Postdoctoral Fellow

Qizhai Li joined the Biostatistics Branch as a visiting fellow in August 2006. His mentor is Dr. Kai Yu, Investigator, Biostatistics Branch, Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics (DCEG). His interests are statistical genetics, longitudinal data analysis and nonparametric methods. Dr. Li’s current research focuses on the methodologies on genome-wide association studies and pathway analysis. Dr. Li received his Ph.D. in Statistics from the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences in July, 2006. Since joining DCEG, he has received D-FARE travel award, and the DCEG Fellowship Achievement Award.



Key Publications:

• • Yu K, Chatterjee N, Wheeler W, Li Q, Wang S, Rothman N, Wacholder S (2007) Flexible design for following up positive findings. The American Journal of Human Genetics 81:540-551
• • Li Q, Zheng G, Li Z, Yu K (2008) Efficient approximation of p-value of maximum of corrected test with application to genome-wide association studies. Annals of Human Genetics 72:397-406
• • Li Q, Yu K (2008) Improved correction for population stratification in genome-wide association studies by identifying hidden population structure. Genetic Epidemiology 32:215-226
• • Li Q, Yu K, Li Z, Zheng G (2008) MAX-Rank: A simple and robust genome-wide scan for case-control association studies. Human Genetics 123:617–623.

Idan Menashe - Postdoctoral Fellow

Idan Menashe joined the Biostatistics Branch (BB), Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics (DCEG) as visiting fellow in January 2007. He is involved in descriptive and analytical studies of cancer, including large-scale genetic association studies, with an emphasis on gene-gene and gene-environment interactions. Dr. Menashe is working collaboratively with a number of investigators throughout the Division, with Dr. Philip S. Rosenberg, Senior Investigator, BB, DCEG as his primary mentor. In recent years, Dr. Menashe conducted studies in various genetic and genomics disciplines such as: population genetics, bioinformatics, and genotype-phenotype association studies. Dr. Menashe received his Ph.D. in Human Genetics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel in 2007. His dissertation research investigated the genetic basis of human olfactory variability, focusing on unusual olfactory receptor genes that segregate with both functional (intact) and non-functional (pseudogene) alleles in human populations.

Key Publications:

• • Menashe I, Rosenberg PS, Chen BE (2008) PGA: power calculator for case-control genetic association analyses. BMC Genet 13;9:36.
• • Menashe I, Abaffy T, Hasin Y, Goshen S, Yahalom V, Luetje CW, Lancet D(2007) Genetic elucidation of human hyperosmia to isovaleric acid. PLoS Biol 30;5(11):e284
• • Menashe I, Aloni R, Lancet D (2006) A probabilistic classifier for olfactory receptor pseudogenes. BMC Bioinformatics 29;7:393
• • Menashe I, Man O, Lancet D, Gilad Y (2003) Different noses for different people. Nat Genet 34(2):143-4.

Ju-Hyun Park - Postdoctoral Fellow

Ju-Hyun Park, Ph.D., joined the Biostatistics Branch (BB), Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics in September 2008 as a postdoctoral fellow after completing his doctorate in Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in August. Prior to that, he was a predoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Institutes of Health, in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. He is working under Dr. Nilanjan Chatterjee, to develop Bayesian statistical approaches for flexible design and analysis of modern epidemiologic studies. His research interests include: developing nonparametric Bayesian methodologies with a focus on density estimation and predictor-dependent clustering. Currently he is involved in developing a Bayesian approach to power calculations for genome-wide association studies. Dr. Park was awarded the Distinguished Student Paper Award at 2008 International Biometric Society Eastern North American Region (ENAR) meeting.

Key Publications:

• • Dunson, D.B. and Park, J.-H. (2008) Kernel stick-breaking processes, Biometrika 95, 307-323.
• • Dunson, D.B., Pillai, N., and Park, J.-H. (2007) Bayesian density regression, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society B 69, 163-183.

Rayna Matsuno Weise - Predoctoral Fellow

Rayna Matsuno Weise joined the Biostatistics Branch (BB), Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics as a pre-doctoral fellow in January 2006 and is currently a Ph.D. student in epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. For her doctoral dissertation, Ms. Matsuno Weise is working work with Dr. William F. Anderson, Investigator, BB and Dr. Mark E. Sherman, Cancer Expert, Hormonal and Reproductive Epidemiology Branch on a population-based molecular epidemiologic study of epithelial ovarian cancer using data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program (SEER) tissue repository. Her study focus is primarily on serous tumors of the ovary and she is assessing: 1) the extent of misclassification of these tumors; 2) population-based incidence and survival patterns of these and tumors of other histologic types; and 3) whether different molecular markers support the hypothesis of etiologic heterogeneity within serous tumors. As part of her fellowship, Ms. Matsuno Weise has also collaborated with Drs. Ruth M. Pfeiffer and Philip S. Rosenberg, Senior Investigators, BB on studies of breast cancer. She continues to explore age incidence and survival patterns as indicators of etiologic heterogeneity.

Key Publications:

• • Matsuno RK, Anderson WF, Yamamoto S, Tsukuma H, Pfeiffer RM, Kobayashi K, Devesa SS, Levine PH. Early- and late-onset breast cancer types among women in the United States and Japan. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarker Prev 2007;16:1437-42.
• • Anderson WF, Matsuno RK. Breast cancer heterogeneity: a mixture of at least two main types. J Natl Cancer Inst 2006;98:941-58.
• • Anderson WF, Matsuno RK, Sherman ME, Lissowska J, Gail MH, Brinton LA, et al. Estimating age-specific breast cancer risks: a descriptive tool to identify age interactions. Cancer Causes Control 2007;18:439-47.