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October 23, 2020

CCTS Biostatistics Group Supports a Broad Range of Rockefeller Scholarship
By Roger Vaughan, MS, DrPH

The mission of the Rockefeller University Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CCTS) is to support high quality, translational science, and educate outstanding translational scientists in the Clinical Scholars program.

One of the outcome metrics of the research support is peer reviewed publications enabled by the CCTS. To that end, the CCTS Biostatistics Group, directed by Dr. Roger Vaughan, and including senior biostatistician Caroline Jiang and statistical programmer Neha Singh, have recently co-authored or been acknowledged on a series of important publications, as listed below, in high impact journals. While members of the biostatistics group may have been included or acknowledged, it took the entire CCTS Team to support each publication.

As part of its educational program, the Biostatistics group reinforces the importance of Team Science and emphasizes the value of including a methodologist as early as possible during research protocol development. This is coupled with a major emphasis on Rigor, Reproducibility, and Reporting (R3), a new CCTS initiative, to insure the integrity of the research and its reporting. It is gratifying, therefore, that so many of the papers have a current of former Clinical Scholar first authors.

Many of the collaborations between the Biostatistics group and investigators began as a result of revision requests from the peer review process, where reviewers rated the quality of the science as high, but had concerns about the analytic approach or methods. As data becomes more complex, as journals become more highly aware of reproducibility and validity issues, and as reviewers become more analytically sophisticated, it is increasingly important that the analytics be of the highest quality and follow the R3 principles.

The CCTS Biostatistics group remains eager to assist with grant and manuscript preparations, so please feel free to contact Dr. Vaughan at roger.vaughan@rockefeller.edu.