The applicant's long-term career goal is to become an independent investigator in the field of psychiatric statistics with an emphasis on research into the relationships between depression and physical health. He will dedicate his career to creating and implementing novel statistical methodologies and study designs to research in this area. This career development award will provide crucial support for achieving this goal. The career development activities proposed during the award period will include training in the scientific and computational models of fMRI studies of depression and cardiovascular reactivity and consultations on causal inference in psychiatric research. There are two primary proposed research goals over the next five years. First, the candidate proposes to adapt statistical methodologies from the field of functional data analysis (FDA) for the examination of potentially causal dynamic covariation in multiple functional processes. Causal inferences will be made by using these statistical methodologies to implement the moderator and mediator framework in the functional setting and also by applications of these methodologies to formal causal models, e.g., structural equation and dynamic causal models. Second, these techniques will be validated on and applied to fMRI studies of depression and cardiovascular reactivity. Specific research goals in these applications will be: 1) exploring potential moderators of patterns of brain activation in depressed and non-depressed subjects;2) modeling functional integration among specialized brain regions related to depression and cardiovascular reactivity;3) examining the moderating effect of psychopathological variables on patterns of brain activation in response to emotional stimuli and to stressors;and 4) relating patterns of activation in specialized brain regions to cardiovascular responses to stressors. The proposed research program will result in the creation and application to psychiatric research of a cutting-edge body of statistical methodologies for examining dynamic variation in functional processes. Moreover, while the initial applications will focus on fMRI research, these statistical methodologies will have wide applicability to psychiatric research in general.
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