{"id":2680,"date":"2014-08-06T15:57:11","date_gmt":"2014-08-06T15:57:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.urbanarch.org\/?page_id=2680"},"modified":"2015-05-26T15:07:55","modified_gmt":"2015-05-26T19:07:55","slug":"spotlight-on-debbie-cheng","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/urbanarch\/spotlight-on-debbie-cheng\/","title":{"rendered":"Spotlight on…Debbie Cheng"},"content":{"rendered":"

Taken from an interview with Debbie Cheng, ScD, Principal Investigator (PI) of the Biostatistics and Data Management Core and Professor of Biostatistics at the Boston University School of Public Health.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

What is your favorite job that you\u2019ve ever had?<\/strong>
\nI\u2019d have to honestly say, it would be this one. I haven\u2019t had a lot of jobs, and this was the longest one I\u2019ve ever been at.<\/p>\n

How did you come to work at BUSPH?<\/strong>
\nI was working in New York and my partner and I got engaged. He was in Boston at the time, and we decided we\u2019d rather be in Boston than New York. I had a couple of friends from graduate school who were in [the biostatistics] department and had a lot of good things to say about it. They just happened to have a[n assistant professor] position open at the time that I was looking to move. Despite the fact that I went to grad school here in Boston I\u2019d never been to Boston Medical Center. So I came to visit and it just seemed like a really nice department with a lot of exciting research going on. It was actually the only place that I even tried to interview at!<\/p>\n

Can you tell us a little about your work with the URBAN ARCH Consortium?<\/strong>
\nAs you know, there are three main cohorts \u2013 Uganda, Russia, and Boston. I am the PI of the BDM Core, and we have a biostatistics and a data management component. I am also the lead statistician for the Uganda and Russia cohorts, so I am involved in study design and developing analytic plans, and I help coordinate the activities overall for the core. We also work with the Admin Core very closely on the website and the data and sample repository, so the BDM is intimately involved with each part of the consortium.
\nWhat do you enjoy most about your work with URBAN ARCH?<\/strong>
\nI really enjoy the opportunity to collaborate with people from all over the world. I\u2019ve worked with Evgeny Krupitsky<\/a> <\/span>and the Russian team for a while and I\u2019ve always really enjoyed that, and now I have the opportunity to work with Judy Hahn<\/a> and the folks in Uganda and San Francisco.<\/p>\n

What interesting or challenging statistical issues come up when working on HIV and alcohol research?<\/strong>
\nThere are a lot of complicated data issues that come up. In terms of characterizing alcohol use, we have been collecting PEth biomarker data and we\u2019re starting to be able to compare these data to self-report as well as begin to assess how to use PEth to classify drinkers. We haven\u2019t had data like this in previous studies, so it\u2019s a great opportunity. It\u2019s a really important question, and hopefully the data we are collecting now will help us answer some questions about how best to classify drinking status.
\nIn addition, alcohol data in general tends to be quite skewed, and we have to consider how to best model it. We\u2019ve used a lot of count models to analyze the non-normal distributions.<\/p>\n

What is one thing about you that people often find surprising?<\/strong>
\nI\u2019m a big sports fan and I like watching a lot of different sports \u2013 football, tennis, hockey. My older daughter likes watching with me and learning about the rules. After you watch for a while they seem like simple sports, but when you have to explain it to somebody it can get really complicated!<\/p>\n

Do you have a favorite team?<\/strong>
\nI\u2019m from Colorado so I\u2019m a big Broncos fan. I grew up watching the Broncos with my dad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Taken from an interview with Debbie Cheng, ScD, Principal Investigator (PI) of the Biostatistics and Data Management Core and Professor of Biostatistics at the Boston University School of Public Health. What is your favorite job that you\u2019ve ever had? I\u2019d have to honestly say, it would be this one. I haven\u2019t had a lot of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10441,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":243,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/urbanarch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2680"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/urbanarch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/urbanarch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/urbanarch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10441"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/urbanarch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2680"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/urbanarch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4360,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/urbanarch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2680\/revisions\/4360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/urbanarch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}