Kimberly Drews, Ph.D.
Professor and Director of Biostatistics
6400 Perkins Road
Baton Rouge, LA 70808-4124
T: 225-763-2722 F: 225-763-2879
PubMed
Dr. Drews is Professor and Director of Biostatistics at Pennington Biomedical Research Center. Dr. Drews has a long history of successful collaborative research leading design, data collection and management, and analytic activities for large clinical studies primarily focused on obesity, diabetes, and metabolic health. The studies include serving as Principal Investigator for the Treatment Options for type 2 Diabetes in Adolescents and Youth (TODAY) and the Lifestyle Interventions For Expectant Mothers (LIFE-Moms) Research Coordinating Unit as well as co-Investigator for the HEALTHY Study, the Lung HIV Microbiome Project (LHMP), and Minimally Invasive Surgical Therapies (MIST) for BHP. As director of the Biostatistics Core, she leads a team responsible for providing analytic support for the research activities which forward Pennington’s mission of understanding the causes of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and dementia through basic, clinical, and population studies.
Dr. Drews brings nearly two decades of experience with the conduct of multi-site trials using both a common protocol and under a consortium model which includes multiple protocols with each also contributing to address common, unified scientific questions. While she has special experience with larger trials, she also enjoys the close collaboration involved in developing and analyzing smaller studies. Dr. Drews also serves as the Director of the Biostatistics, Epidemiology, & Research Design Core for the Louisiana Clinical & Translational Science Center (LA CaTS) and supports the Nutrition Obesity Research Center Biostatistics and Clinical Epidemiology Core.
William D. Johnson, Ph.D.
Professor of Biostatistics
6400 Perkins Road
Baton Rouge, LA 70808-4124
T: 225-763-2932 F: 225-763-2879
PubMed
William D. Johnson, Ph.D. is Professor of Biostatistics at Pennington Biomedical Research Center. He has a long history of teaching and mentoring in biostatistics graduate school programs coupled with publishing his research on advances in statistical methods and collaborative research in other disciplines. He served on the graduate school faculties of the University of North Carolina, Louisiana State University Medical Center, and University of Mississippi Medical Center prior joining Pennington Biomedical in 2007. His current research focuses on providing expert guidance and analytic resources to Pennington’s research scientists so that their discoveries are framed in best practice, evidence based qualitative and quantitative inferential statistics. Pennington Biomedical research scientists include approximately 100 faculty members and post-doctoral researchers who work together with dedicated effort to discover mechanisms that cause specific human disorders, such as obesity and dementia, and find ways to prevent and perhaps even reverse these detrimental conditions. In addition to numerous pre-clinical studies, Pennington Biomedical typically has 20 to 30 clinical trials underway throughout any given year. The statistical analysis of research investigations play a fundamental role in the validity of interpretations and inferences drawn from qualitative and quantitative research. The Biostatistics unit receives funding from the Louisiana Clinical and Translational Research Center (NIH-NIGMS), the Botanical Research Center (NIH-NCCAM), The Louisiana Trial to Reduce Obesity in Primary Care (PCORI), The Female Athlete Body Project (NIH-NIMH), Aerobic Plus Resistance Training to Increase insulin Sensitivity in African American Men (NIH-R01), Effects of Slowly Digesting Starch in People with Pre-diabetes (NIH-NIDDK), Military Health Behaviors: Weight Measurements and Standards for Soldiers (DOD), in addition to numerous other grants and contracts.
Robbie Beyl, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
6400 Perkins Road
Baton Rouge, LA 70808
T: 225-763-2863
F: 225-225-7630
PubMed
Dr. Beyl’s interests are in statistical consulting and educating the research community on the importance of statistics, particularly post-doctoral researchers and junior faculty though LA CaTS. Dr. Beyl’s consulting focus is with public health related data, but he works with researchers across various fields. Statistical research interests include the development of statistical methods for the analysis of categorical data and the application of novel statistical techniques to the design, analysis and interpretation of data. Part of this research is in the area of test performance using accuracy of p-values.
Shengping Yang, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
6400 Perkins Road
Baton Rouge, LA 70808
T: 225-763-2500
F: 225-225-7630
PubMed
Shengping Yang is a biostatistician at Pennington Biomedical Research Center. His primary area of research revolves around developing statistical methods that can tackle common analytical challenges encountered in clinical, pre-clinical, and genomic research. His particular focus is on developing innovative designs for clinical trials and methodologies for analyzing high-dimensional data.
Dachuan Zhang, M.Ap.St. (Master of Applied Statistics)
Biostatistician
6400 Perkins Road
Baton Rouge, LA 70808
T: 225-763-3005
Dachuan (Ben) Zhang, earned his Master’s Degree in Applied Statistics from Louisiana State University (LSU) in August, 2014. Ever since then he has been working as a full-time biostatistician in the Department of Biostatistics at Pennington Biomedical Research Center. Dachuan has experience in a variety of statistical techniques, including mixed modeling, categorical analysis, meta-analysis, mediation analysis and advanced modeling. Dachuan also has experience working with large datasets, such as the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Dachuan is proficient in graphing, processing and analyzing data using SAS and R, as well as managing data using Access Database. Dachuan's primary responsibilities as a biostatistician include contributing to the design of studies, conducting power analyses, analyzing data from health-related research problems, and helping to produce publishable results.
Yaming Shao, M.Stats.
Biostatistician
6400 Perkins Road
Baton Rouge, LA 70808
T: 225-610-7596
Yaming Shao earned her Master’s degree in statistics from North Carolina State University. After finishing the graduate study, she joined Health Dialogue based in Boston as a Healthcare data analyst in 2009. Her work in that position mainly focused on analyzing healthcare data to produce vital reports indicating clients’ medical cost savings based upon clinical quality indicators. From 2010 to 2014, she was employed in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as an application analyst where her duties focused on investigating associations between common disease outcomes and human genetic variance interaction with environmental effects. Yaming Shao has been serving as a biostatistician in the Dept. of Biostatistics at Pennington Biomedical Research Center since January, 2015. Her main research interests include experimental design, clinical trials, and longitudinal data analysis.
Joseph Madere, M.Ap.Stat.
Biostatistician
6400 Perkins Road
Baton Rouge, LA 70808
T: 225-763-2610
Joseph Madere graduated from Louisiana State University with a Master of Applied Statistics degree in the Fall of 2017, and has been working full-time as a biostatistician at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center since January 2018. He has experience with a wide variety of statistical models, with an emphasis on linear mixed effects models for repeated measures data. He works closely with the PhD biostatisticians and regularly collaborates with researchers at Pennington Biomedical and other biomedical research centers. His work involves multiple programming languages including SAS, SQL, R, and Stata to help with statistical analysis, data cleaning, data validation, randomizations, power analysis, and simulations.
