I am currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Applied Mathematics at MD Anderson Cancer Center. I received my PhD from the Department of Statistics at Texas A&M University in August, 2000, under the direction of Raymond J. Carroll and Naisyin Wang. I became interested in Statistics through my undergraduate mentor, Marlin Eby, while getting my B.A. in Mathematics Education at Messiah College in Grantham, PA. My primary research interests include statistical methods for analyzing functional and image data, and also methods for analyzing various types of data encountered in bioinformatics, including mass spectrometry and 2-d gel proteomics data, microarray, and array cGH data. In my bioinformatics work, I frequently collaborate with colleagues in the Department of Bioinformatics. I also collaborate with numerous researchers at MD Anderson on various research projects involving gastro-intestinal related cancers.
Functional Data Analysis
Microproteomics: Analysis of protein diversity in small samples (with Howard B. Gutstein, Suresh P. Annangudi, and Jonathan V. Sweedler), Mass Spectrometry Reviews (2008)
Proteomics, the large-scale study of protein expression in organisms, offers the potential to evaluate global...
Pinnacle: A Fast, Automatic Method for Detecting and Quantifying Protein Spots in 2-Dimensional Gel Electrophoresis Data (with Brittain C. Walla and Howard B. Gutstein), Bioinformatics (2008)
Motivation: One of the key limitations for proteomic studies using 2-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2DE) is...
Statistical Issues in Proteomic Research, Bulletin of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (2007)
Bayesian Analysis of Mass Spectrometry Proteomics Data using Wavelet Based Functional Mixed Models (with Philip J. Brown, Richard C. Herrick, Keith A. Baggerly, and Kevin R. Coombes), Biometrics (2007)
In this paper, we analyze MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry proteomics data using Bayesian wavelet-based functional mixed...
Wavelet-Based Functional Mixed Models to characterize Population Heterogeneity in Accelerometer Profiles: A Case Study. (with Cassandra Arroyo, Brent A. Coull, Louise M. Ryan, and Steven L. Gortmaker), Journal of the American Statstical Association (2006)
We present a case study illustrating the challenges of analyzing accelerometer data taken from a...
Genomics
Alternative Probeset Definitions for Combining Microarray Data Across Studies Using Different Versions of Affymetrix Oligonucleotide Arrays (with Chunlei Wu, Kevin R. Coombes, Keith A. Baggerly, Jing Wang, and Li Zhang), Meta-Analysis in Genetics (2006)
Many published microarray studies have small to moderate sample sizes, and thus have low statistical...
Some Statistical Issues in Microarray Gene Expression Data (with Matthew S. Mayo and Byron J. Gajewski), Radiation Research (2006)
In this paper we discuss some of the statistical issues that should be considered when...
An Introduction to High-Throughput Bioinformatics Data (with Keith A. Baggerly and Kevin R. Coombes), Bayesian Inference in Gene Expression and Proteomics (2006)
High throughput biological assays supply thousands of measurements per sample, and the sheer amount of...
Bayesian Mixture Models for Gene Expression and Protein Profiles (with Michele Guindani, Kim-Anh Do, and Peter Mueller), Bayesian Inference for Gene Expression and Proteomics (2006)
We review the use of semi-parametric mixture models for Bayesian inference in high throughput genomic...
Shrinkage Estimation for SAGE Data using a Mixture Dirichlet Prior (with Keith A. Baggerly and Kevin R. Coombes), Bayesian Inferene for Gene Expression and Proteomics (2006)
Serial Analysis of Gene Expression (SAGE) is a technique for estimating the gene expression profile...
Proteomics
Microproteomics: Analysis of protein diversity in small samples (with Howard B. Gutstein, Suresh P. Annangudi, and Jonathan V. Sweedler), Mass Spectrometry Reviews (2008)
Proteomics, the large-scale study of protein expression in organisms, offers the potential to evaluate global...
Pinnacle: A Fast, Automatic Method for Detecting and Quantifying Protein Spots in 2-Dimensional Gel Electrophoresis Data (with Brittain C. Walla and Howard B. Gutstein), Bioinformatics (2008)
Motivation: One of the key limitations for proteomic studies using 2-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2DE) is...
Statistical Issues in Proteomic Research, Bulletin of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (2007)
Statistical contributions to proteomic research (with Keith A. Baggerly, Howard B. Gutstein, and Kevin R. Coombes), The Urine Proteome (2007)
Proteomic profiling has the potential to impact the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of various diseases....
Bayesian Analysis of Mass Spectrometry Proteomics Data using Wavelet Based Functional Mixed Models (with Philip J. Brown, Richard C. Herrick, Keith A. Baggerly, and Kevin R. Coombes), Biometrics (2007)
In this paper, we analyze MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry proteomics data using Bayesian wavelet-based functional mixed...
Statistical Methods: Bootstrap
The BLUPs Are Not “Best” When It Comes To Bootstrapping, Statistics and Probability Letters (2002)
In the setting of mixed models, some researchers may construct a semiparametric bootstrap by sampling...