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

Calcineurin activation causes retinal ganglion cell degeneration

Corelease of dopamine and GABA by a retinal dopaminergic neuron

Digital quantification of precursor frequency in the fallopian tube and its significance

Gain of chromosome arm 1q in atypical meningioma correlates with shorter progression-free survival

Genetic risk factors in Parkinson's disease: Single gene effects and interactions of genotypes

Hazard Regression Models of Early Mortality in Trauma Centers

Identification of tissue contamination by polymorphic deletion probe fluorescence in situ hybridization

Imperfect gold standards for kidney injury biomarker evaluation

Inhibition of the NFAT pathway alleviates amyloid beta neurotoxicity in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease

Orchestrated experience-driven Arc responses are disrupted in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease

PAX2-null secretory cell outgrowths in the oviduct and their relationship to pelvic serous cancer

Predicting sites of new hemorrhage with amyloid imaging in cerebral amyloid angiopathy

Reducing available soluble β-amyloid prevents progression of cerebral amyloid angiopathy in transgenic mice

Somatic mitochondrial DNA mutations in early Parkinson and incidental lewy body disease

Stable size distribution of amyloid plaques over the course of alzheimer disease

Supervised Bayesian latent class models for high-dimensional data

The distribution of survival times after injury

The SIST-M: Predictive validity of a brief structured clinical dementia rating interview

A novel signal processing approach for the detection of copy number variations in the human genome

Association of PGC-1alpha polymorphisms with age of onset and risk of Parkinson's disease

Calcineurin inhibition with systemic FK506 treatment increases dendritic branching and dendritic spine density in healthy adult mouse brain

Comparison of clinical subgroup aCGH profiles through pseudolikelihood ratio tests

Diagnosis of hydatidiform moles by polymorphic deletion probe fluorescence in Situ hybridization

Fallopian tube correlates of ovarian serous borderline tumors

Genome-wide comparison of paired fresh frozen and formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded gliomas by custom BAC and oligonucleotide array comparative genomic hybridization: Facilitating analysis of archival gliomas