About

I am a professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. While I remain on the faculty for now, I recently took a position as Professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Utah School of Medicine.

I received pre- and post- doctoral training from the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health under the guidance of Butch Tsiatis (pre) and James Robins (post). I joined Johns Hopkins in 1997 as an assistant professor and was promoted to full professor in 2008.

My research is focused on how to draw inferences about treatment effects in the presence of selection bias. Specifically, I am interested in how to report results in randomized trials with informative missing or censored data and in observational studies with non-random treatment assignment. Click on the research link on the left for more details.

I served on the National Academy panel, which issued the report The Prevention and Treatment of Missing Data in Clinical Trials.

I am senior statistician of the METRC consortium, which is funded by the Department of Defense to conduct multi-center clinical research relevant to the treatment and outcomes of orthopaedic trauma sustained in the military. I have also served as the lead statistician on a number of large evaluation studies including the National Study of the Costs and Outcomes of Trauma (NSCOT), Guided Care for Chronically Ill Older Adults and Healthy Steps for Young Children. Click on the collaborations link above for more detail.

I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, although I have retained little of the classic accent. I am married to Julie Alpher Scharfstein, who was a classmate of mine at Harvard. We have three children: Kayla, Ava, and Nadia.