Karen Bandeen-Roche, PhD, Core Director
Associate Professor of Biostatistics
Bloomberg School of Public Health Don Baughman, MS, Data Manager
Johns Hopkins Center on Aging and Health Karl Broman, PhD, Advisory Council member
Assistant Professor of Biostatistics
Bloomberg School of Public Health Ronald Brookmeyer, PhD, Advisory Council member
Professor of Biostatistics
Bloomberg School of Public Health Minh Dao, MS, Database Manager
Johns Hopkins McKusick - Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine Jing Tian, MS, Statistician
Johns Hopkins Center on Aging and Health Mei-Cheng Wang, PhD, Advisory Council member
Professor of Biostatistics
Bloomberg School of Public Health Long He, MS, Programmer
John Hopkins Center on Aging and Health Qian-Li Xue, PhD, Assistant Professor
Departments of Medicine, Biostatistics, and Epidemiology
and
Director of Biostatistics
Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology
Department of Medicine
and Center on Aging and Health
Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions Scott L. Zeger, PhD, Advisory Council member
Professor of Biostatistics
Bloomberg School of Public Health Marcia D. Omondi, Administrative Assistant
Johns Hopkins Center on Aging and Health Dr. Karen Bandeen-Roche (Core Director), is Associate Professor in the Johns Hopkins Department of Biostatistics and the only statistician to have yet been named a Brookdale National Fellow in aging research. She has served in a similar role to that proposed here as director of the Biostatistics Cores of the Women’s Health and Aging Studies I and II, the Salisbury Eye Evaluation study, and the Salisbury Eye Evaluation Intervention in Nursing Homes study. Her faculty-level involvement in population-based studies on aging dates to 1991 and has been the majority focus of her public health research ever since. She is an active member of the Gerontological Society of America, having organized quantitative methods symposia for the annual meeting five of the last six years. Dr. Bandeen-Roche’s statistical methods contributions are directly relevant to the issues that the proposed Center must grapple with, including challenges of complex measurement and hypotheses that involve repeated measures on multiple aspects of health. They include seminal work developing regression and model checking methods for longitudinal and latent variable models and applying these methods to measuring, summarizing, modeling, and longitudinally tracking disability and disease data. In recognition of these contributions, Dr. Bandeen-Roche was inducted as a 2001 Fellow of the American Statistical Association. Dr. Bandeen-Roche has served in leadership roles in education related to aging at JH, including co-directing the Johns Hopkins Training Program in the Epidemiology and Biostatistics of Aging with the Center’s Principal Investigator, directing Biostatistics graduate students writing, thus far, two master’s theses and three doctoral dissertations with direct applications to gerontology, and coordinating the Biostatistics Department portion of the Hopkins Interdepartmental Seminars on Aging. She was awarded one of the Student Council’s annual awards for Advising, Teaching, and Mentoring (AMTRA) in 2001. Finally, Dr. Bandeen-Roche was one of six faculty chosen to serve on the most recently convened School of Public Health Dean’s Special Committee on the future of Aging Science at Hopkins. Dr. Qian-Li Xue (Core Co-Director), Assistant Professor in the Johns Hopkins Department of Epidemiology, is the Statistical Director at the Johns Hopkins Center on Aging and Health (COAH). He received his PhD in the Johns Hopkins Department of Biostatistics in 2000. Dr. Xue has been actively involved in research on aging for five years, having collaborated closely with Dr. Bandeen-Roche as a statistician for both the Women’s Health and Aging Studies (WHAS) I and II since 1996. He has presented WHAS-related research of his initiation in symposia at American Statistical Association, Gerontological Society of America and Biometrics Society meetings; that work was honored with a 2000 Travel Award from the International Biometrics Society/Eastern North American Region for excellence in biostatistics research and has been accepted for publication in one of the field’s top journals. Dr. Xue’s primary area of statistical expertise is the development and application of statistical methods for aging research involving truncation of information as a result of screening. Accounting for such truncation is vitally important to research on aging, where study participants are often screened for eligibility based on their disability status or cognitive status. Most recently, Dr. Xue has been developing methods to improve the inferences one can draw from data with informatively missing covariates–a common problem in population studies on aging due to selective participation in demanding assessments or longitudinal dropout related to deterioration in health or physical functioning. As Statistical Director at the COAH, Dr. Xue combines expertise developing and applying statistical methods with supervision of master’s level statisticians, programmers, and data professionals who collaborate with the Center’s studies. Scott Zeger is Professor and Chair of the Department of Biostatistics. He is a world-renowned expert in longitudinal data analysis (etc.). Dr. Zeger has been active in research on aging since 1989, when he co-developed the Women’s Health and Aging contract proposal that was ultimately won and put in practice by Dr. Fried, Dr. Zeger, Dr. Bandeen-Roche and colleagues at Johns Hopkins. He was also seminally involved in the initiation of the Salisbury Eye Evaluation study. Together with Drs. Fried, Bandeen-Roche, and Glass, he currently co-directs Johns Hopkins’ training program in the Epidemiology and Biostatistics of Aging, now in its second funding cycle. He also is the statistical leader in Dr. Fried’s Experience Corps study, a trial to evaluate the benefits of social engagement for older adults’ health and well-being. He is exceptionally well positioned to advise our Core toward activities of maximal impact for both the aging and statistics fields. Moreover, his expertise in the analysis of longitudinal data, including specialty expertise in the analysis of time series, will inform Center analysis of sleep and cardiac monitoring data. Ron Brookmeyer is Professor in the Department of Biostatistics. He is renowned as an international leader in work to project the course of the AIDS epidemic. More recently, he has been a leading voice in the debate over the natural history of Alzheimer’s disease, its prevalence and its incidence. Evidencing Dr. Brookmeyer’s primary commitment to science, he has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Like Dr. Zeger, Dr. Brookmeyer is superbly qualified to advise our Core for combined impact on the aging and statistics fields. He also contributes world-class expertise in statistical methods for the analysis of disease registries and disease surveillance data; this would critically inform our thinking on the analysis of combined data sets on frailty and its consequences as well as the development of registries such as proposed by Dr. Zieman (see RCDC proposal). Finally, Dr. Brookmeyer is a source of specialty expertise in the analysis of longitudinal multidimensional data. His approach to this problem is quite distinct from that developed by the Biostatistics Core leaders and should especially enrich the efforts of our Core in that area.
Mei-Cheng Wang is Professor in the Department of Biostatistics. Two areas of her expertise are directly relevant for this project. First, she is internationally known for her work developing methods for analyzing data subject to informative censoring and competing risks, such as occurs when the frailest older adults drop out of longitudinal studies or die. Secondly, she contributes specialty expertise and ongoing research activity in prevalent cohort sampling, such as occurs when already-disabled individuals are recruited and followed longitudinally for recurrent episodes or worsening of their disability. This latter aspect of research on aging, in particular, has received little attention to our knowledge, so that Dr. Wang’s expertise should inform this Core’s work in truly novel directions. Karl Broman has been Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics since 1999. He collaborates in research on the determinants of cataract in older adults in the SEECATS study, an investigation being conducted by Hopkins’ Wilmer Eye Institute in conjunction with the Salisbury Eye Evaluation study. Dr. Broman earned his PhD in Statistics in 1997 from one of the most highly respected statistical genetics programs in the world, at the University of California, Berkeley, under the direction of Dr. Terry Speed. Thereafter, he held a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at the Marshfield Medical Research Program, where he participated in the Program’s work mapping the genome. A resulting paper that was first-authored by Dr. Broman was named the best paper in Genetic Epidemiology in 1999. Dr. Broman’s research expertise includes the development of improved methods for detecting and identifying genes contributing to variation in complex phenotypes in humans and experimental organisms. The OAIC’s Genetics Core will devote effort to developing such methods, which are critical for linking genetic determinants to the frailty phenotype; Dr. Broman’s expertise will serve to bridge a better collaboration between the Biostatistics and Genetics Cores than would otherwise be possible. | 
