About Us
The Brown University Center for Statistical
Sciences (CSS) was founded in 1995 to foster research and statistical
education at Brown Medical School and the University at large. Center
activity and personnel have grown over the years to the present
configuration of over twenty faculty members, staff biostatisticians,
graduate student assistants, and administrative and computing support
personnel. The Center is located at 121 S. Main Street and has state-of-the-art computing facilities and
networking infrastructure.
Research
CSS faculty andstaff conduct
methodologic research in a
number of areas of biostatistics, including statistical methods for
the assessment of diagnostic technology, design and analysis of
clinical trials, statistical methods for health services and outcomes
research, longitudinal data analysis, methodology for the analysis of
observational studies, meta-analysis, and statistical methods for
psychiatry and the behavioral sciences. The Center also serves as the
biostatistics core for both national and local biomedical research
projects. Owing to its expertise in the evaluation of diagnostic
technology, CSS hosts the Biostatistics Center of the
American College of Radiology Imaging
Network, a NCI (National Cancer Institute)-funded collaborative
group conducting multi-center studies of imaging modalities for cancer
screening, diagnosis, and image-guided therapy. In addition to ACRIN,
current federally funded collaborative research projects at CSS
include the biostatistics cores of International Breast MRI
Consortium, the Brown/Lifespan/Tufts
Center for AIDS Research,the
Brown/Lifespan Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center, and
projects in health services and outcomes research.
Education
A
graduate
curriculum in biostatistics is offered by Center faculty as a
track of the graduate program of the
Department of Community
Health. The program was launched in September 1999 and leads to MS
and PhD degrees in Biostatistics. Center faculty also launched the
Brown undergraduate concentration in Statistics, in collaboration with
departments across the campus. The Center organizes the
Brown Statistics Seminar, which is held on
Monday afternoons and features talks on current developments in
statistical methodology and is open to the entire Brown community. In
addition, Center faculty are holding regular "brown-bag"
seminars in which topics of current research are discussed. Presenters
in these informal seminars include Brown graduate students and faculty
as well as other campus- and hospital-based researchers.