Candidate: Dr. Blanchard has worked for the Statistical and Data Analysis Center (SDAC) of the Pediatric AIDS Clinical Trials Group (PACTG) for nine years and presently works as section head of pharmacology. She possesses a long-term combined interest in statistics and physiology with specific interest in nonlinear mixed effects (NLME) models and their application to pharmacology. Her career goal is to become an expert in the field of NLME models as they apply to pharmacokinetics (PK) and pharmacodynamics (PD) and seek a faculty position in the unique joint area of pharmacokinetics and biostatistics. Environment: Both Frontier Science and Technology Research, Inc. and the Pediatric Pharmacology Research Unit (PPRU) at University of California are active research centers participating in the PACTG: Frontier is a subcontractor to the SDAC for the PACTG at Harvard, and the PPRU is a funded pharmacology lab. Development plan: The development plan is divided into three parts, including reading courses, workshops and research projects. The reading courses will cover the following topics: Bayesian Statistics, Theoretical Statistics, MCMC Methods, and Nonlinear Mixed Models: Advanced Computation, Pharmacokinetics, and Design for NLME models. Related workshops will be included. The research projects will be interwoven with the courses to develop the skills required to do applied and theoretical research. Research: Improved clinical pharmacology data are needed for the safe and effective use of drugs in children, however the best approach for data collection and analysis has not been defined. Use of sparse sampling and population PK analysis using NLME models has been advocated. This proposal focuses on recommending the fully Bayesian approach for modeling pediatric PK data, through six projects. These projects deal with model parameterization, sparse sampling and censored values, prior specification, assessing model saturation and covariate selection.
