UCLA DomStat

About Us

Faculty

 

David Elashoff

Director
Professor, Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research
Professor, Department of Biostatistics
Professor, Department of Computational Medicine

Dr. Elashoff is a Professor of Medicine, Biostatistics and Computational Medicine at UCLA and Director of the Department of Medicine Statistics Core. He serves as Leader for the Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design (BERD) program for the UCLA CTSI.


Li-Jung Liang

Professor, Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research
Senior Statistician, Semel Institute Center for Community Health

Dr. Liang received her Ph.D. in Biostatistics from UCLA in 2005. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries for over 10 years. Her statistical research interests are hierarchical (multi-level) modeling, longitudinal data analysis, Bayesian methods, Markov models, and Markov chain Monte Carlo computation.


Chi-hong Tseng

Professor, Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research

Dr. Tseng received his Ph.D. in Biostatistics from UCLA in 2004. His research interests include design of clinical trials, survival analysis, multiple comparisons problems, and statistical genetics.


Kosuke Kawai

Associate Professor, Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research

Dr. Kawai's research interests include multilevel modeling of hierarchal data and causal inference models. He also conducts research on herpes zoster epidemiology to inform appropriate strategies for prevention. He previously worked at Boston Children's Hospital and actively collaborated with clinical faculty members and researchers. He received his Sc.D. in epidemiology from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.


Myung-Shin Sim

Associate Professor, Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research

Dr. Sim is an Associate Professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research. Her research interests include survival analysis, longitudinal analysis in various cancers and infectious diseases, and developing mathematical vaccine models. She has extensive experience with multicenter clinical trials.


Nicholas Jackson

Assistant Professor, Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research

Dr. Jackson's research interests are in the intersection of statistics, behavior, and public health. He holds a Master's of Public Health in Biostatistics and a PhD in Quantitative Psychology. His statistical interests are in longitudinal design and related methodology; specifically accelerated longitudinal designs and their estimation using mixed models.


Alexandra Klomhaus

Assistant Professor, Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research

Dr. Klomhaus received her Ph.D. in Biostatistics from UCLA in 2021. Her research interests include methods for evaluating longitudinal electronic health records data that is complicated by common challenges often present in observational medical data, like irregular visit times, sparse outcomes, and outcome-dependent time spent in treatment.


Staff

 

Sitaram Vangala

Associate Director
Principal Statistician

Sitaram (Ram) Vangala is a Principal Statistician and Associate Director of DOMStat. His research interests include biomedical and social scientific applications of Bayesian methods, causal inference in observational studies, and statistical learning with high-dimensional data.


Amanda La Venture

Administrative Director

Amanda La Venture is the Administrative Director for DOMStat. Amanda manages business operations for the unit and specializes in building efficient systems that promote collaboration and progressive business practices.


Jenny Brook

Principal Statistician

Jenny Brook has been working as a Principal Statistician at UCLA since 2000. Over the years she has taken an integral part in helping others with their research, both hands on and as part of theoretical support. Jenny has worked on various projects, offering statistical expertise to both faculty and graduate students.


Lucia Chen

Principal Statistician

Lucia has worked at DOMStat since 2017. She has collaborated extensively with investigators from the fields of nephrology, hepatology, immunogenetics, pediatrics, and public health. Some of her statistical areas of expertise include survival analysis, longitudinal analysis, and missing data imputation methods.


Jeffrey Gornbein

Principal Statistician
Professor, Department of Computational Medicine

Dr. Gornbein is a Professor in the Department of Computational Medicine (formerly Biomathematics) and is a Principal Statistician in the Statistics Core of the Department of Medicine at UCLA. He is also a lecturer in the UCLA School of Public Health and at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.


Tristan Grogan

Principal Statistician

Tristan's primary area of statistical research is in methodology for the design and analysis of biomarker discovery and validation studies. He has presented research at several conferences including the EDRN, Joint Statistical Meetings, UCLA Department of Medicine Research Day, and the SCASA Applied Statistics Workshop.


Rong Guo

Principal Statistician

Rong is a principal statistician at DOMStat with over 20 years of biomedical research experience. She has worked with investigators to address their methodological and statistical analysis needs. Rong is interested in healthcare research involving national data, such as the VA Database, and data from NHANES, NMACS and NHAMCS. She also has a special interest in survey design and data analysis.


Mei Leng

Principal Statistician

With 20+ years of statistical research work at UCLA and a strong medical background, Mei is experienced with many different studies and models. Mei is interested in health improving related research, and has worked with public use survey data such as NHANES, HHANES, American Census (as well as APS), ADD Health, CMS, HRS, MEPS, CHIS, and more.


Daniela Markovic

Principal Statistician

Daniela Markovic is a Principal Statistician at the UCLA Department of Medicine Statistics Core. She is experienced in helping UCLA biomedical researchers with statistical data analysis, manuscript writing, database management and grant proposals, and she has worked in this area since 2006. Her statistical interests include analysis of survey data, prediction modeling, survival analysis, correlated data analysis and clinical trials among others.


Tahmineh Romero

Principal Statistician

Tahmineh joined DOMStat in 2017; her educational background is in Mathematical Statistics and Biostatistics, and her research interests are in cancer genomics, high-dimensional data and statistical machine learning. She also has a special interest in Pediatric field studies and growth curve modeling.


Dennis Ruenger

Principal Statistician

After completing his doctorate in cognitive psychology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, Dr. Ruenger held postdoctoral appointments at UC Santa Barbara and USC where he investigated the cognitive and neural mechanisms of habit formation.


Holly Wilhalme

Principal Statistician

Holly Wilhalme is a Principal Statistician at DOMStat. She has experience in a wide range of applications spanning health research, environmental health and Phase I through III clinical trials. She has provided statistical consulting and analysis support to faculty within many departments across the School of Medicine including General Internal Medicine, Neurology/Alzheimer’s Center, Public Health, Dentistry, Nephrology, Hematology/Oncology, Gastroenterology, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Cardiology and Geriatrics.


Keren Chen

Senior Statistician

Keren Chen is a senior statistician at DOMStat. She has a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from UCLA and a MBA in Data Analytics. Before joining DOMStat, Keren has had five-years of industrial experience in database management, visualization, and data analysis. She has experience working in languages such as Python, R, SAS, SQL. She also has a strong interest in machine learning.


Lillian Chen

Senior Statistician

Lillian Chen is a senior statistician at DOMStat. She received her Master's Degree in Biostatistics from UCLA in 2022. Lillian has a strong background in physical and life sciences and excels in work adaptability and communication of scientific findings.


Angshuman Saha

Senior Statistician

Dr. Angshuman Saha is a senior statistician at the UCLA Department of Medicine Core and has over 25 years of experience in broad areas of machine learning, probabilistic inference, statistical modeling. His doctoral degree was in the areas of statistical models of PET imaging and he has worked on statistical inference on medical images from other modalities like MRI and CT. Dr. Saha possesses in-depth knowledge and experience in diverse domains such as natural language processing, computer vision, financial risk estimation, renewable energy forecasting, anomaly detection in sensor data, reliability and probabilistic lifing.


Victoria Adebambo

Statistician

Victoria graduated from the University of Waterloo in Math and Statistics. She joined DOMStat as a research associate in 2020 where she assists statisticians and principal investigators with data management and analysis.


Rebecca Chung

Statistician

Rebecca graduated from UCLA with a B.S. in Statistics. As a statistician at DOMStat, Rebecca assists principal investigators with data management, cleaning, and analysis, primarily with programming languages such as R and STATA.


Eric Demer

Statistician

Dr. Demer is a Statistician in the UCLA Statistics Core. His interests include quantitative aspects of study design, and finding Bayesian priors with a reduced dimension of improperness to allow comparisons of models in situations where, for standard improper priors, the posteriors would depend on the order of updates.


Yash Motwani

Statistician

Yash graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a B.S. in Public Health. Since starting at DOMStat, he has assisted principal investigators in their research by building REDCap databases, transforming and loading requested datasets into these databases, and aiding in analysis and manuscript writing.


Claudia Perez

Statistician

Claudia Perez is a statistician at the UCLA Department of Medicine Statistics Core who assists investigators with data analysis, data manipulation, and database management. Claudia has experience working in programming languages such as R, SAS, and SQL and also creating online surveys and databases using RedCap (Research Electronic Data CAPture).


Estefania Ramires-Sanchez

Statistician

Estefania Ramires-Sanchez has been a member of DOMStat since 2017, and has collaborated on dozens of projects including projects in Pulmonary Medicine, Pediatrics, Ophthalmology, Education, and the Diversity Program Consortium (DPC).


Arseniy Vasilyev

Statistician

Arseniy has been a statistician at the UCLA Department of Medicine Statistics Core since 2017. He is primarily interested in public health policy, economic and social impact, and large database development. He has worked on a wide range of public health projects, including Medicaid/Medicare expansion, medical claims and EHR, as well as a number of clinical trials for GIM and Department of Anesthesiology.


Christine Marie Castle

Research Associate

Christine Marie Castle is a research associate at the UCLA Department of Medicine Statistics Core. She assists principal investigators with their research through database management, data manipulation, data analysis, creating reports, and building REDCap databases.


Joshua Lee

Research Associate

Joshua Lee graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a B.S. in Computer Science. He is currently a research associate at the UCLA Department of Medicine Statistics Core. Since starting at DOMStat, he has assisted investigators in their research with database creation in REDCap, data analysis using R, and clustering analysis in Python.


Jinhui Liu

Research Associate

Jinhui Liu is a research associate at the UCLA Department of Medicine Statistics Core. He assists statisticians and principal investigators with their research. Jinhui has experience working in programming languages such as Python, R, and SQL. His interests include data visualization and machine learning.


Derek Pham

Research Associate

Derek graduated from UCLA with a B.S. in Mathematics/Applied Science. As a research associate at DOMStat, he assists principal investigators with creating reports, data management, and data analysis, primarily with programming languages such as R and STATA.


Paige-Ashley Smith

Research Associate

Paige-Ashley Smith is a research associate at the UCLA Department of Medicine Statistics Core. She assists principal investigators with their research through database management, data manipulation, data analysis, creating reports, and building REDCap databases.


Martin Lai

Systems Manager

Martin Lai is the systems manager for the UCLA CTSI implementation of REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture). Martin manages the day-to-day operations of REDCap, and provides REDCap consultations and programming support to study teams.


Scarlet Karimian

Fund Manager

Scarlet Karimian is the fund manager for DOMStat. She has a bachelor's degree from UCLA in sociology with minors in political science and film & television. Scarlet manages the financial portfolios for the DOMStat faculty and staff, as well as the DOMStat sales and service account.


Byron Rivera

Administrative Assistant

Byron is the Administrative Assistant for DOMStat. Byron provides administrative support to the department through calendar management, data entry, triaging inquiries for core services, and providing exceptional customer service.


Data Core

 

Yusuke Tsugawa

Director, Data Core
Associate Professor, Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research
Associate Professor, Department of Health Policy and Management

Yusuke Tsugawa, MD, MPH, PhD is Associate Professor of Medicine and Health Policy and Management at UCLA. Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA, he was a health specialist at the World Bank group and a research fellow at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on determinants of the quality and costs of care of individual physicians.


Maya Fujimura

Administrative Director, Data Core

Maya acts as the system administrator of the Data Core by providing database infrastructure support to research teams, and she oversees data use agreements and data management plans for faculty and investigators. She has received a PhD in Health Sciences from the University of Tokyo.