Bio

My primary research expertise at this time is in statistical methods for auditing Medicare providers.  The U.S. loses tens of billions every year to this problem.  Through work with local government contractor Palmetto GBA and others, new statistical methods for auditing have been developed.  For my work in this area I was honored to receive the USC Breakthrough Leadership in Research Award for 2014.

This work in healthcare auditing spawned an interest in methods for measuring strength of interrater agreement, also known as model-based kappa statistics.  Dr. Kerrie Nelson, a former USC colleague now at Boston University, has collaborated with me for several years on the subject.  Dr. Nelson and I received an NIH R03 award in 2008 and currently have a 4-year, $1.1M R01 grant.

An offshoot of the work with Dr. Nelson is a novel new model for medical diagnostic processes which allows for simultaneous estimation of (a) patient propensities for disease, (b) rater bias; and (c) rater diagnostic skill.  This work, joint with colleague Xiaoyan Lin and former dissertation student Hua Chen, is nearing submission.

I also have research expertise and multiple publications in the areas of Response Surface Methodology and Multiple Comparison Methods.