Faculty and Staff

The focus of my research collaborations and methodological development work as previous Director of Biostatistics at the Yale Program on Aging for 12 years and current Leader of the Yale Alzheimer's Disease Research Center's Data Management and Statistics Core. I founded the field of Gerontological Biostatistics. I lead the Design and Statistics Core of Imbedded Pragmatic Alzheimer’s Disease and AD-Related Dementias Clinical Trials Collaboratory. I am Co-director of the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Core of the Yale Transdisciplinary Collaborative Center for Precision Medicine focused on Health Disparities, especially adults with multiple chronic conditions. I co-authored a paper on health disparities in the Decadal Survey of Behavioral and Social Science Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease-Related Dementias. My innovated analytic methods include joint trajectories of cognition, function and mortality. Innovative designs and biostatistical methods are required to rigorously address the myriad of unanswered scientific questions related to older adults and persons with dementia, including risk prediction. With over 285 peer-reviewed articles and continuous NIH funding since 2000, my research has focused on issues related to the design of clinical trials for and studies of older adults. These and other methodologic advances resulted in me being an invited speaker at an NIH/NIA conference on Longitudinal Methods and another on Clinical Trial Design. In 2017 and 2020, I co-chaired the Study Design and Metrics component of the NIH meeting on the 21st Century Cures Act: Inclusion Across the Lifespan I and II. I previously chaired the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center's Data Cores Steering Committee, member of the Executive Committee, and Co-Lead of the Data and Measures Committee of the NIA-funded AGING Initiative, which is a collaboration of Older Americans Independence Centers and the Healthcare Systems Research Network. I have a wealth of experience conducting epidemiologic studies and am a recognized authority on longitudinal statistical methods, including latent class trajectory models, and joint models. A defining hallmark of my biostatistical approach is that instead of developing analytic methods in the absence of a clinical question or adapting the study question to available analytical techniques, I adapt new statistical methods that suitably model the specific study question.

Dr. Brandt completed a general Preventive Medicine residency at Madigan Army Medical Center in 1989 and a post-doctoral fellowship sponsored by the National Library of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine in 1997. She is board certified in Preventive Medicine and Clinical Informatics. Her research is interdisciplinary and focuses on issues related to the design, development and use of informatics tools in the domain of clinical research, as well as health services research.

Pete Charpentier has been involved in data management for epidemiological and clinical studies for more than 35 years. He has been responsible for data management activities for the Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center at Yale since its inception in 1992, and since 2002 he has been the Director of its Data Management and Informatics Core (DMIC). In addition to his research support leadership role, he participates in database application development projects, working primarily in SAS, MySQL, SQL Server, PHP, JavaScript and MSAccess/VBA. He currently serves as lead designer and developer for three patient-oriented clinical guidance web applications based on research conducted by Program on Aging Faculty Drs. Terri Fried and Liana Fraenkel. He is the development team leader for a 70-site multicenter study, Risk Stratification in Older Adults with Acute Myocardial Infarction (SILVER-AMI; Dr. Sarwat Chaudhry).

Jim is a Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at YMS. As a biostatistician at Yale since 2002 he has co-authored over 200 peer-reviewed articles with a diverse group of Yale investigators. Dr. Dziura also serves as the Deputy Director of both the Yale Center for Analytical Sciences (YCAS) and the Yale Data Coordinating Center (YDCC) in the Yale School of Public Health. He has been active in training young investigators, both individually (as a mentor and statistical resource for K-awardees, post-doctoral fellows, residents and Master’s students) and in the classroom (where he has developed a graduate-level course and several workshops on biostatistics in clinical research). His primary research interests are in the coordination of multicenter clinical trials. Over the past ten years he has overseen data coordinating and biostatistical efforts for several trials. Notably, he served as the PI of the data coordinating center for the RUPP Autism Network study of Guanfacine for the treatment of hyperactivity. He is the Director of the Data Coordinating Center for the Autism Biomarkers Consortium for Clinical Trials (ABC-CT), a multicenter longitudinal study developing reproducible experimental biomarkers (e.g. from EEG, eye tracking) for use as stratification factors and outcomes in clinical trials.He is a senior biostatistician (and unblinded statistician for the DSMB) for the Data Coordinating Center of a large pragmatic cluster-randomized trial for the prevention of serious fall injuries (STRIDE) in 6,000 older persons from 86 health care practices.

Peter is professor of biostatistics at YSPH and director of the Yale Center for Analytical Sciences (YCAS) and the Yale Data Coordinating Center. Dr. Peduzzi has nearly 40 years’ experience in the design, conduct and analysis of clinical trials with a particular focus on pragmatic trials. He is the PI of several data coordinating centers funded by NIH and PCORI. Before coming to Yale he was the Director of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Cooperative Studies Program Coordinating Center in West Haven, Connecticut, which conducts multi-center, multi-national clinical trials and epidemiologic studies. He still maintains an affiliation with this center. His primary research interests have focused on the efficient design and analysis of clinical trials, with a recent focus on clustered randomized trials.