Data Science ARES: Bhramar Mukherjee – Apr. 4, 2022

Session Description

Talk Title: Using Electronic Health Records for Scientific Research: Promises and Perils

Abstract:

Electronic Health Records linked with other auxiliary data sources hold tremendous potential for conducting real time actionable research. However, one has to answer two fundamental questions before conducting inference: “Who is in my study?” and “What is the target population of Inference?”. Without accounting for selection bias one can quickly produce fast but inaccurate conclusions. In this talk, I will discuss large-scale association studies across multiple phenotypes, namely Phenome-wide association studies (PheWAS) that have gained traction in the genetics and medical informatics world. I will present several applications of this tool in genetics, cancer and for identifying risk factors for COVID-19 hospitalization and mortality. I will further discuss a statistical framework for jointly considering selection bias and phenotype misclassification in such analyses. This is joint work with Lars Fritsche, Lauren Beesley and Maxwell Salvatore and many others at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

Speaker Profile:

Bhramar Mukherjee is John D. Kalbfleisch Collegiate Professor and Chair, Department of Biostatistics; Professor, Department of Epidemiology, Professor, Global Public Health, University of Michigan (UM) School of Public Health; Research Professor and Core Faculty Member, Michigan Institute of Data Science (MIDAS), University of Michigan. She also serves as the Associate Director for Quantitative Data Sciences, University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center. She is the Associate Workgroup Director for Cohort Development for U-M Precision Health, an institution-wide presidential initiative. Her research interests include statistical methods for analysis of electronic health records, studies of gene-environment interaction, Bayesian methods, shrinkage estimation, analysis of multiple pollutants. Collaborative areas are mainly in cancer, cardiovascular diseases, reproductive health, exposure science and environmental epidemiology. She has co-authored more than 280 publications in statistics, biostatistics, medicine and public health and is serving as PI on NSF and NIH funded methodology grants. She is the founding director of the University of Michigan’s summer institute on Big Data. Bhramar is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is the recipient of many awards for her scholarship, service and teaching at the University of Michigan and beyond. Bhramar and her team have been modeling the SARS-CoV-2 virus trajectory in India for the last one year which has been covered by major media outlets like Reuters, BBC, NPR, NYT, WSJ, Der Spiegel, Australian National Radio and the Times of India.