Current Research and Scholarly Interests
I am interested in the methodology pertinent to dealing with research problems where biological and behavioral interests meet. These interests have been applied not only in psychiatric research, but in those areas of Cardiology, Pediatrics and other fields of medicine in which behavioral research is becoming ever more salient.
Specifically, I am interested in the methods of assessing the quality of measurement (evaluation of medical tests, reliability, validity), in methods of detecting the sources of errors and correcting them, and in the impacts of such errors both on clinical decision making and on research.
This interest is fundamentally related to my interest in design issues for both valid, powerful and effective research projects. I have been involved in the full range of medical research projects, from randomized clinical trials, to epidemiological studies, to preventions studies and even to basic research projects. From this has come research into the issues of statistical power, and strategies to improve power by exercising design considerations rather than increasing sample size.
Finally I am involved as much as possible with efforts to train medical researchers and clinicians to recognize the problems with inference from research project results.