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

Probing tumor microenvironment in patients with newly diagnosed glioblastoma during chemoradiation and adjuvant temozolomide with functional MRI

rBPI21 (opebacan) promotes rapid trilineage hematopoietic recovery in a murine model of high-dose total body irradiation

Reader response: Systematic review and statistical analysis of the integrity of 33 randomized controlled trials

Tau induces blood vessel abnormalities and angiogenesis-related gene expression in P301L transgenic mice and human Alzheimer's disease

The prognostic value of histopathologic lesions in native kidney biopsy specimens: Results from the Boston kidney biopsy cohort study

Threshold regression to accommodate a censored covariate

Time-to-event data with time-varying biomarkers measured only at study entry, with applications to Alzheimer's disease

APOE-related risk of mild cognitive impairment and dementia for prevention trials: An analysis of four cohorts

Association of cancer and Alzheimer's disease risk in a national cohort of veterans

Bayesian Variable Selection Methods for Matched Case-Control Studies

Cognitive resilience in clinical and preclinical Alzheimer’s disease: the Association of Amyloid and Tau Burden on cognitive performance

Correlation among baseline variables yields non-uniformity of p-values

Fluorodeoxyglucose metabolism associated with tau-amyloid interaction predicts memory decline

Is this significant?

Linear regression with a randomly censored covariate: application to an Alzheimer's study

Neurofibrillary tangle stage and the rate of progression of Alzheimer symptoms: Modeling using an autopsy cohort and application to clinical trial design

Soluble oligomeric amyloid-β induces calcium dyshomeostasis that precedes synapse loss in the living mouse brain

A concept-wide association study of clinical notes to discover new predictors of kidney failure

Comparison of urine output among patients treated with more intensive versus less intensive RRT: Results from the acute renal failure trial network study

Decreased hippocampal metabolism in high-amyloid mild cognitive impairment

Episodic memory of odors stratifies Alzheimer biomarkers in normal elderly

Maternal dementia age at onset in relation to amyloid burden in non-demented elderly offspring

Multiple imputation of a randomly censored covariate improves logistic regression analysis

Optimization of Signal Decomposition Matched Filtering (SDMF) for Improved Detection of Copy-Number Variations

Plaque-associated local toxicity increases over the clinical course of Alzheimer disease