The University of Kentucky College of Public Health welcomes Dr. Rui Wang as a guest speaker to the next EPI-Biostats lecture series on April 20th, located in the College of Nursing, Room 511.
Dr. Wang is an Associate Professor of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Division of Biostatistics in the Department of Population Medicine at the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute.
Dr. Wang is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her research interests include the design, monitoring, and analysis of parallel and stepped-wedge cluster randomized trials, analysis of longitudinal data and time-to-event data and addressing missing data issues in correlated or distributed data settings.
Presentation Title: Design, Monitoring, and Analysis of Cluster Randomized Trials
Summary: Cluster randomized trials (CRTs) are well-suited to evaluate intervention strategies against infectious diseases, from the prevention of HIV and hospital-acquired infections to the Ebola outbreak.
In the design and analysis of the Botswana Combination Prevention Project, a CRT evaluating the effectiveness of a HIV prevention strategy in 30 communities across Botswana, several statistical challenges arise, including cross-contamination across clusters, mid-course changes in study interventions, and intermittent study visits resulting in interval-censored outcomes.
To address these challenges, we developed an agent-based network model to simulate the community-level impact of a combination prevention strategy, a flexible approach for estimating conditional power with correlated interval-censored data, a general method to construct randomization-based confidence intervals for treatment effects using individual-level data from a CRT, and inference methods based on a marginal proportional hazards model for clustered interval-censored outcomes with time-dependent covariates.
