The Statistics group's main focus is on applied collaborations with investigators in a range of scientific fields that make heavy use of sophisticated statistics. The statistics faculty also do extensive research on methodological questions that underlie their applied studies. Statistics faculty are Hongshik Ahn, Stephen Finch, Nancy Mendell, Haipeng Xing, and Wei Zhu along with adjunct professor John Chen in the School of Medicine. Their primary area of application is biomedical research. Our statisticians collaborate with biomedical researchers in the Stony Brook Medical School, nearby Brookhaven National Lab and Cold Spring Harbor Lab as well as scientists in major New York City medical centers, such as NYU, Mt. Sinai and Sloan-Kettering.

Hongshik Ahn's specialty is tree-structured regression modeling for censored survival data. After earning his Ph.D., he initially worked as a biostatistician at the National Center for Toxicological Research (NCTR) on animal carcinogenicity, developmental toxicology, and drug stability analysis. He came to Stony Brook in 1996, but he continued working on NCTR problems while developing new collaborations with Stony Brook biomedical researchers. For more information, see Ahn webpage.

Stephen Finch is an applied statistician whose major areas of interest are statistical genetic epidemiology and applied longitudinal data analysis. Statistical genetic epidemiology studies the genetics of complex human traits, such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. One of the major longitudinal studies, with faculty in the Stony Brook Department of Psychiatry, concerns the effects of medications on the course of mental illnesses. For more information, see Finch webpage.

Nancy Mendell is a biostatistician was a wide range of biomedical collaborators at Stony Brook and across the country. Her greatest expertise is in statistical genetics and genetic epidemiology, and her primary collaborators in this research are at Harvard Medical School. One aspect of her research is identifying traits which have a different distribution in the individual affected with a disease than unaffected individuals and which have different distribution in the relatives of the affected individuals. Diseases she studies include schizophrenia, glaucoma, and malaria. For more information, see Mendell webpage.

Song Wu is a biostatistician whose research focuses mainly on statistical genetics by developing new methodologies to unravel the genetics underlying complex traits. He had received intensive training in both Statistics and Genetics, and is working towards bridging these two fields. His specific research areas include QTL mapping, linkage mapping, linkage disequilibrium mapping, microarray data analysis, genome-wide association study, next-generation sequencing data analysis (WG-seq, RNA-seq, ChIP-seq), molecular pathway analysis, bioinformatics and applied longitudinal data analysis. For more information, see Wu webpage.

Haipeng Xing is an applied statistician whose research is focused on: (i) change-points detection, parameter estimation and adaptive control problems and their applications in engineering, economics and genetics; (ii) statistical models and methods in financial econometrics and engineering; and (iii) time series modeling. He is co-author, with T.L. Lai of Stanford, of a major textbook on financial statistics. For more information, see Xing webpage.

Wei Zhu is a biostatistician whose diverse research projects include brain image analysis, design and analysis of clinical trials, genetics modeling, environmental statistics, and aviation safety analysis. She is a leader in applying multiple-objective optimal design to clinical trials and quantal dose-response experiments. ZhuÕs collaborators include biomedical researchers at the Stony Brook Medical Center, NYU Medical School, Brookhaven National Lab, New York State Departments of Health and of Environmental Conservation, Merck Research Laboratories, and the Federal Aviation Administration. For more information, see Zhu webpage.