Rebecca A Betensky

Chair of the Department of Biostatistics

Professor of Biostatistics

Professional overview

Prior to NYU, Dr. Betensky was Professor of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She was director of the Harvard Catalyst (Clinical and Translational Science Award) Biostatistics Program; director of the Data and Statistics Core for the Massachusetts Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center; and director of the Biostatistics Neurology Core at Massachusetts General Hospital. Previously, she was the Biostatistics Program Leader for the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center.

Dr. Betensky’s research focuses on methods for the analysis of censored and truncated outcomes and covariates, which frequently arise from the subsampling of cohort studies. She has a long-time interest in clinical trials, and has written on the evaluation of biomarkers and the use and interpretation of p-values. She has collaborated extensively in studies in neurologic diseases, and serves as statistical editor for Annals of Neurology.

Dr. Betensky was awarded, and directed for 15 years, an NIH T32 training program in neurostatistics and neuroepidemiology for pre- and post-doctoral students in biostatistics and epidemiology and for clinician-scientists. She previously directed Harvard’s Biostatistics programs to promote and support diversity at all levels in the field of quantitative public health. She was also a member of the BMRD Study Section for review of NIH statistical methodology grants; on committees for the Institute of Medicine; and a co-chair of the technical advisory committee for the scientific registry of transplant recipients.

Dr. Betensky an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association and of the International Statistical Institute, and is a past recipient of the Spiegelman Award from the American Public Health Association. She currently serves as a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors for Clinical Science and Epidemiology at the National Cancer Institute.

Education

AB, Mathematics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

PhD, Statistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA

Areas of research and study

Biology

Biostatistics

Neuroepidemiology

Neurology

Neurostatistics

Translational science

Publications

Publications

Association of Amyloid and Tau with Cognition in Preclinical Alzheimer Disease: A Longitudinal Study

Design and analysis considerations for combining data from multiple biomarker studies

Exploring predictors of response to dacomitinib in EGFR-amplified recurrent glioblastoma

Genetic overlap between vascular pathologies and Alzheimer's dementia and potential causal mechanisms

New guidelines for statistical reporting

Nonidentifiability in the presence of factorization for truncated data

Opposing Roles of apolipoprotein E in aging and neurodegeneration

Serum levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D at diagnosis are not associated with overall survival in esophageal adenocarcinoma

The impact of amyloid-beta and tau on prospective cognitive decline in older individuals

The missing indicator approach for censored covariates subject to limit of detection in logistic regression models

The p-Value Requires Context, Not a Threshold

Transformation model estimation of survival under dependent truncation and independent censoring

Wide Range of Clinical Outcomes in Patients with Gliomatosis Cerebri Growth Pattern: A Clinical, Radiographic, and Histopathologic Study

An optimal Wilcoxon–Mann–Whitney test of mortality and a continuous outcome

Biomarker validation with an imperfect reference: Issues and bounds

Hypothesis Tests for Neyman's Bias in Case–Control Studies

Immunophenotyping of pediatric brain tumors: correlating immune infiltrate with histology, mutational load, and survival and assessing clonal T cell response

Integration of risk factors for Parkinson disease in 2 large longitudinal cohorts

Interaction between caffeine and polymorphisms of glutamate ionotropic receptor NMDA type subunit 2A (GRIN2A) and cytochrome P450 1A2 (CYP1A2) on Parkinson's disease risk

Intravenous thrombolysis in unwitnessed stroke onset: MR WITNESS trial results

Inverse probability weighted Cox regression for doubly truncated data

Multicrossover Randomized Controlled Trial Designs in Alzheimer Disease

Neuronal calcineurin transcriptional targets parallel changes observed in Alzheimer disease brain

Permutation tests for general dependent truncation

PET staging of amyloidosis using striatum