Director : Nawar M. Shara, PhD
Chief, Research Data Science, MedStar Health Research Institute
Co-Director, Center of Biostatistics, Informatics and Data Science (CBIDS), Co-Director, MedStar – Georgetown Collaborative Center for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare Research and Education (AI CoLab)
Dr Shara’s research focus includes Big Data solutions, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, data visualization, Predictive Analytics, Adaptive Designs and Optimization schemes in clinical trials. She is a member of American Statistical Association, the Royal Statistical Society, the American Society of Nephrology, the Women in Statistics Caucus, ASA Scientific and Public Affairs Advisory Committee. She is the President of the National Arab American Medical Association (NAAMA DC Chapter) as well as the chair of the Science and Research Committee for NAAMA. Dr Shara has served as a peer reviewer for the following journals: Diabetes, American Journal of Cardiology and Journal of Community Hospital Internal Medicine Perspectives and has authored over 50 peer-reviewed journal publications. Dr Shara served as Principal Investigator of several NIH-funded studies, National Kidney Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Her earlier work aimed at examining correlated of kidney and cardiovascular disease including oxidative Stress and surrogates of kidney function. She is currently the principal investigator of a NIH NCATS supplements looking to leverage voice activated technology (Alexa) to help patients with Heart Failure to better manage their disease. Dr Shara conducts, supports and oversees clinical and translational research across MedStar hospitals and is involved in teaching and education at Georgetown. Dr. Shara is the Chair for a session on AI in medicine at the First International Conference in Systems and Network Medicine at Georgetown University, Washington DC, September 2019. | Read More
Co-Director : John Kwagyan, PhD
Director of Biostatistics, Clinical Research Unit, Howard University College of Medicine
Graduate (Associate) Professor, Masters in Public Health Program, Howard University
Dr. John Kwagyan is a research biostatistician and methodologist. He obtained his PhD in Statistics from Temple University and has additional training in computing from the Army High Performance Computing Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. He also has training in bioinformatics at the National Center for Bioinformatics Technology at the National Institutes of Health. His research interests include mathematical and statistical modeling of correlated data, survival and time-to-event models, statistical genetics, clinical trials, pharmacokinetic & pharmacodynamic modeling, and meta-analyses methodology. Areas of application include clinical outcomes in minority populations. | Read More
BERD Team : Mihriye Mete, PhD
Associate Director of Biostatistics, Department of Biostatistics and Biomedical Informatics, MedStar Health Research Institute (MHRI)
Associate (Research) Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Georgetown University School of Medicine
Dr. Mete, an expert in numerous statistical software applications including Stata, SPSS and R, specializes in quantitative research methods and study design. Her interdisciplinary background provides her with the ability to see the public health, policy, and socio-economic implications of clinical trials, enabling her to incorporate the most appropriate and scientifically sound study design and data analysis approaches. Dr. Mete has extensive collaboration experience and routinely assists researchers in the development and management of quantitative interdisciplinary research. Specifically, she develops proposals, analyzes data, and assists with manuscript preparation and submission. Because of the collaborative nature of her work, she has experience working with numerous investigators across a broad range of disciplines and has co-authored several peer-reviewed manuscripts. Her work has been widely published, in journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Association, Diabetes Care, and the Journal of Traumatic Stress. | Read More
BERD Team : Alexander Libin, PhD
Scientific Director of the Well-Being Literacy, Multimedia Education, & Psychosocial Research Program (WeLL), National MedStar Rehabilitation Network
Associate Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine, Georgetown University Medical Center
Dr. Libin is a psychosocial scientist and multimedia learning innovator investigating how critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and shared decision-making promote coping with life stressors in social networks, teams, and individuals. He conducts studies in CyberPsychology, digital culture and translational sciences exploring the impact of autonomous learning, health education, and digital technology, such as interactive multimedia and simulations, serious games and personal robotics, on well-being and psychosocial functioning across the life span. Vulnerable clinical populations including military veterans, persons with neurological disorders, chronic conditions and disability, children and older adults are the focus of Dr. Libin’s research. Dr. Libin is an accomplished writer who has authored and co-authored 7 books, and provided editorship on 11 books, on the topics of visual literacy for self-management, coping with life stressors, understanding human differences and similarities, women’s well-being, cognition and learning styles, psychology of consciousness, empirical research on archetypes, and unified mental representation theory. He has contributed to more than 150 book chapters, peer reviewed articles, and popular magazine articles in four languages (Russian, English, Spanish, and Japanese) covering the results of research findings and applied work in such areas as cyberanthropology, robotic psychology and robotherapy, role playing games as a learning tool for psychological literacy, person-centered psychosocial interventions, self-management and well-being, injury prevention, ethical dilemmas in clinical research, and patient – health care provider communication. Dr. Libin is a founding editor of Coping with Life Stress journal at Frontiers (Lausanne, Switzerland) and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder with Military Medical Research at BMC (Springer Nature).