Members and Collaborators


Lab Members

Ruth Etzioni

Ruth Etzioni

Title: Principal Investigator

Professor, Biostatistics Program
Rosalie and Harold Rea Brown Endowed Chair
Curriculum Vitae
Faculty Profile
@retzioni

Dr. Etzioni’s work focuses on statistical and computer modeling for policy development, with a focus on prostate cancer research. Dr. Etzioni’s models of disease have been used to estimate the lifetime probabilities of prostate cancer and its outcomes, study the extent of overdiagnosis associated with prostate cancer screening, and quantify the roles of screening and changes in receipt of initial therapies in explaining population mortality declines. She is a member of three national panels on prostate cancer early detection and serves on the American Cancer Society’s newly formed Guideline Development Panel. Her work on prostate cancer modeling is done as part of the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network (CISNET) consortium, for which she serves on the steering committee and is the Principal Investigator on the Prostate Cancer Coordinating Center. Dr. Etzioni is also Principal Investigator for the Biostatistics Core of the Pacific Northwest Prostate Cancer SPORE program and an ASA Fellow.

Kemal Caglar Gogebakan

Kemal Caglar Gogebakan

CEDAR, OHSU Knight Cancer Institute, School of Medicine
OHSU Knight Cancer Institute, School of Medicine
LinkedIn

 

Roman Gulati

Roman Gulati

Title: Senior Statistical Analyst

Biostatistics Program
GitHub
Google Scholar

Mr. Gulati is a designer, developer, and analyst of statistical models to investigate population impacts of national clinical practice patterns and cancer control policies. Since joining Dr. Etzioni’s group, he has developed and extended a model of prostate cancer natural history, a mathematical simulation model of disease onset, progression, detection, treatment, and survival. Using this model, he has led independent and collaborative modeling studies as part of the CISNET prostate cancer working group. Mr. Gulati also provides key statistical support for research studies in the Pacific Northwest Prostate SPORE and in the center's Public Health Sciences, Basic Sciences, and Clinical Research divisions. He designs randomized trials, analyzes molecular and clinical datasets, and helps to develop original methods for reliable inference.

 

 

 

Lucas J. Liu, Ph.D.

Lucas J. Liu, Ph.D.

Title: Statistical Programmer

Dr. Liu received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Kentucky. His research interests lie in developing unbiased, interpretable, and robust artificial intelligence (AI) models for healthcare. The primary objective of these models is to provide precise and equitable predictions for patient outcomes. Dr. Liu joined Dr. Etzioni's lab at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in July 2023, and his current work focuses on developing innovative AI algorithms to enhance the diagnosis, treatment, and recurrence monitoring of prostate and breast cancer.

Brenda Mutai

Brenda Mutai

Title: Research Project Manager

Biostatistics Program
LinkedIn

Ms. Mutai has a long history of working in the health care and biomedical industries. She has a Bachelor’s Degree focused in Public Health from University of Massachusetts, Amherst and is currently enrolled in the University of Washington Master of Science in Biomedical Regulatory Affairs program. She has extensive experience in project management and research administration.

 

 

Yaw Nyame, MD

Yaw Nyame, MD

Title: Assistant Professor
Email: nyamey@uw.edu

University of Washington
Department of Urology
Profile

Dr. Nyame attended medical school at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University and business school at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, graduating in 2012. Prior to medical school, he completed a master’s in health services and administration at the school of public health at the George Washington University. Dr. Nyame completed his general surgery internship and urology residency training at the Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. He came to the northwest to complete a Society of Urologic Oncology accredited fellowship at the University of Washington and joined the faculty upon the completion of his training.

Dr. Nyame has a research interest in healthcare disparities in urologic cancers, with a focus in both the molecular epigenomic and health services aspects of health inequities in prostate cancer and other urologic malignancies.

Lukas Owens

Lukas Owens

Title: Statistical Programmer

LinkedIn
GitHub

Lukas Owens is a statistical programmer and analyst in the Etzioni Lab. He received his BA in mathematics from Whitman College and trained in actuarial science following his undergraduate studies. In Dr. Etzioni’s lab, he collaborates with the other members of the group to develop statistical models of cancer screening and treatment, particularly for prostate cancer. His research interests include methods in survival analysis and multi-state modeling, and their applications to the study of cancer.

Yibai Zhao

Yibai Zhao

Title: Statistical Research Associate

LinkedIn

Dr. Zhao received her PhD in Biostatistics from University of Massachusetts – Amherst, developing mixture models for analysis of heterogenous survival data subject to interval-censoring. Her work in Dr.Etzioni’s lab focus on modeling the nature history of prostate cancer progression and recurrence in an active surveillance study. She also works collaboratively with other statistician and clinicians for research studies in the Pacific Northwest Prostate Cancer SPORE program.


Collaborators

Charlotte Gard

Charlotte Gard

Title: Associate Professor

New Mexico State University
Profile
CV
LinkedIn

Bill Grady

Bill Grady

Title: Professor

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Cetner
Profile
Grady Lab

Dr. William “Bill” Grady identifies new ways to prevent, detect and treat colon cancer and other gastrointestinal, or GI, cancers. His research centers on molecular markers of disease, called biomarkers, that are easily accessible in blood or stool samples. A molecular biologist, Dr. Grady identifies biomarkers that eventually could be used in widely available tests to detect cancer early, when it is most treatable, or even identify healthy tissues at high risk of becoming cancerous. With such methods, doctors could tailor cancer prevention tests and therapies to those who need them the most. Dr. Grady is a leader of national research groups in his field. He is also a gastroenterologist who cares for patients with GI cancers and precancers and people with genetic conditions that increase their risk of developing GI cancers.

Eveline Heijnsdijk

Eveline Heijnsdijk

Title: Assistant Professor

Erasmus MC
Department of Public Health

Eveline Heijnsdijk has been working for 13 years at the Department of Public Health, especially on evaluating the harms and benefits of breast cancer screening, prostate cancer screening and childhood vision and hearing screening. She has extensive experience in modelling the natural history of breast cancer and prostate cancer and the effects of screening on the life histories. She is a member of the Cancer Intervention and Screening Network (CISNET) group.

Chi Hyun Lee

Chi Hyun Lee

Title: Assistant Professor

The University of Massachusetts Amherst
School of Public Health & Health Sciences
Profile 

Chi Hyun is an Assistant professor in the Department of Biostatistics & Epidemiology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Before joining UMass Amherst in 2018, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biostatistics at MD Anderson Cancer Center for three years. She earned her PhD degree in Biostatistics at the University of Minnesota in 2015. Her research interests are in statistical methodology developments for complex survival data with applications to biomedical research. Chi Hyun’s recent research focuses on analyzing recurrent event data, bivariate survival data, and modeling survival data under biased sampling settings. She is also interested in developing statistical methods for clinically interpretable measurements and applying statistical methods to data from cancer research, children health studies, and family planning studies. In her free time, Chi Hyun enjoys cooking, indoor climbing, racket sports, and taking long walks. 

Jane Lange

Jane Lange

Title: Staff Scientist


Dr. Lange's obtained her PhD from the University of Washington Biostatistics Department in 2014. Her interests focus on stochastic modeling of within-host disease processes and statistical methods for exploiting the information in medical records data.  Her work in the Etzioni lab has focused on modeling the natural history of prostate cancer progression and recurrence using observational data. These natural history models allow for answering relevant policy questions using simulation methodology.

Dimitris Rizopoulos

Dimitris Rizopoulos

Title: Professor

Erasmus University Medical Center

Profile
Twitter
Github
Google Scholar

My research focuses on joint models for longitudinal and time-to-event data with applications in biomarker identification, precision medicine, precision screening and active surveillance. I currently serve as a co-Editor for Biostatistics.

Carolyn Rutter

Carolyn Rutter

Title: Professor

Pardee RAND Graduate School
Profile

Carolyn Rutter (she/her) is a senior statistician at the RAND Corporation and a professor at Pardee RAND Graduate School. Her research interests include microsimulation modeling, developing and applying Bayesian models, evaluation of diagnostic and screening tests, and meta-analysis and systematic reviews.  Rutter is a principal investigator (PI) for a Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network (CISNET) team and led the development of the CRC-SPIN microsimulation model for colorectal cancer. She developed a likelihood-free method for model calibration, implemented using the R package "imabc". This method is especially useful for complex models that are calibrated to multiple targets.  She also has an interest in understanding and addressing health care inequities and disparities, and assessing health care quality and provider performance. Rutter is a fellow of the American Statistical Association with more than 150 articles published in peer-reviewed journals, including Annals of Internal Medicine, Annals of Applied Statistics, Biostatistics, Journal of the American Statistical Society, Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Medical Decision Making, Medical Care, and Statistics in Medicine. Rutter is an associate editor for Statistics in Medicine and serves on the editorial board for Medical Decision Making and Statistics in Medicine. Rutter received her Ph.D. in biostatistics from UCLA and completed post-doctoral training in Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School.

 

Marc Ryser

Marc Ryser

Title: Assistant Professor

Population Health Sciences
School of Medicine
Duke Cancer Institute
Profile
Ryser Lab

Noel Weiss

Noel Weiss

Title: Professor
Email: nweiss@uw.edu

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and
University of Washington
Profile

Noel S. Weiss, MD, DrPH, has been a faculty member at the University of Washington (currently an Emeritus Professor) and at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center since 1973.  At the University, he served as the Chair of the Department of Epidemiology from 1984-93. At the Cancer Center, he has investigated the epidemiology of gynecologic and other forms of cancer, as well as the efficacy of a number of forms of cancer screening.  Dr. Weiss has worked extensively in the areas of clinical epidemiology and epidemiologic methods.  He is the author of Clinical Epidemiology: The Study of the Outcome of Illness (Third Edition), Exercises in Epidemiology (Second Edition), and (with Thomas Koepsell) Epidemiologic Methods (Second Edition), as well as over 700 articles in the peer-reviewed medical literature.


Postdocs


Students

Mohamed Albirair

Mohamed Albirair

PhD Student in Implementation Science
Department of Global Health
University of Washington
LinkedIn