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

Designed extension of survival studies: Application to clinical trials with unrecognized heterogeneity

Estimating time to event from longitudinal categorical data: An analysis of multiple sclerosis progression

Loss of the mismatch repair protein MSH6 in human glioblastomas is associated with tumor progression during temozolomide treatment

Multivariate logistic regression for familial aggregation in age at disease onset

Predicting short-term disability in multiple sclerosis

Testing goodness of fit of a uniform truncation model

Tests of association under misclassification: Application to histological sampling in oncology

A computationally simple bivariate survival estimator for efficacy and safety

A computationally tractable multivariate random effects model for clustered binary data

A pseudolikelihood approach for simultaneous analysis of array comparative genomic hybridizations

Activation of STAT3, MAPK, and AKT in malignant astrocytic gliomas: Correlation with EGFR status, tumor grade, and survival

AKT activation in human glioblastomas enhances proliferation via TSC2 and S6 kinase signaling

Analysis of co-aggregation of cancer based on registry data

Characterization of amyloid deposition in the APPswe/PS1dE9 mouse model of Alzheimer disease

Effects of unmeasured heterogeneity in the linear transformation model for censored data

Expression of oligodendroglial and astrocytic lineage markers in diffuse gliomas: Use of YKL-40, ApoE, ASCL1, and NKX2-2

Family History of Diabetes Is a Major Determinant of Endothelial Function

Feature-specific penalized latent class analysis for genomic data

Glioma test array for use with formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded tissue: Array comparative genomic hybridization correlates with loss of heterozygosity and fluorescence in situ hybridization

Hospital volume versus outcome: An unusual example of bivariate association

Immunoglobulin gene rearrangement analysis in cerebrospinal fluid of patients with lymphoproliferative processes

Kinetics of cerebral amyloid angiopathy progression in a transgenic mouse model of Alzheimer disease

Methods to classify familial relationships in the presence of laboratory errors, without parental data

Outcomes in a series of 103 retroperitoneal sarcomas

Analysis of clonal immunoglobulin heavy chain rearrangements in ocular lymphoma