Original Research

Members of the Department of Statistics perform original research to develop new or extend existing statistical methods that are essential to accomplishing the research mission of RERF. Members also propose and lead multidisciplinary studies that rely on their computational and quantitative expertise. This research originates from within the Department or in collaboration with investigators from one of the Department’s affiliated institutions. Important areas of emphasis in the Department of Statistics are: design and analysis of epidemiology studies, design and analysis of longitudinal studies, risk estimation/dose-response modelling, radiation dosimetry, dosimetry error/ measurement error, causal inference/ mediation analysis, biologically based models, spatial statistics, and statistical genomics/genetic epidemiology/ bioinformatics. This link provides a bibliography of selected peer-reviewed reports of the Department’s original research.

Collaborative Research

Members of the Department of Statistics serve as co-investigator on research protocols relevant to RERF’s scientific mission. In collaboration with scientists in the RERF Departments of Clinical Sciences, Molecular Biosciences, and Epidemiology, Department members participate in essential ways in the design, analysis, interpretation and publication of studies of the health effect of ionizing radiation deriving from RERF’s historic cohorts – the Life Span Study of disease incidence and mortality in 120,000 atomic bomb survivors, the Adult Health Study of 25,000 survivors with longitudinal clinical follow-up since 1958, and the study of disease incidence and mortality in the F1 cohort of 75,000 offspring of survivors, over 10,000 of whom additionally have clinical follow-up since 2002. An exciting and important new direction of research at RERF in which the Department of Statistics will play a central role is genetic studies to investigate the underlying mechanisms of radiation-induced carcinogenesis and the heritable effects of parental radiation exposure using bio-samples collected longitudinally over 70 years and stored at RERF. This link provides a bibliography of selected peer-reviewed reports of the Department’s collaborative research.