CORE 2: DATA AND METHODOLOGY CORE (DMC) Primary responsibility for consultation, data management and data analytic support for the Center projects will be provided by the DMC which will be run by SIStat, the biostatistics core in the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior (Catherine Sugar, PhD, director). SIStat personnel include senior faculty from the departments ofBiostatistics, Psychiatry and Psychology who devote part of their time to the Core's projects, as well as full-time staff biostatisticians, programmers and data managers. Two additional senior faculty, Dr. Tom Belin ofthe UCLA Department of Biostatistics, and Dr. jim Mintz, former director ofthis Core and currently Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Texas San Antonio Health Science Center, have been recruited to provide specialized statistical consulting in their areas of expertise. Dr. Sugar will continue to direct the DMC. She will provide consulting services, supervise other personnel, and be a liaison to the consulting faculty. The DMC will assist Center researchers with data analysis, design of new projects, and conduct of ongoing experiments. The DMC will maintain and expand the Center's centralized database and will continue to provide specialized software interfaces to enable Center researchers to enter data reliably, access it readily, and analyze it properly. It will also manage the center website which serves as a portal for communication with the schizophrenia research community and the broader public. The Center's data management system enables rapid and accurate entry of data from all relevant evaluations and assessments. It provides a common repository for all Center data, which includes both the research data from the Cores and summary variables from the projects. The centralized files will be ready for periodic report generation for administrative purposes and ongoing statistical analysis: In general, data management and analysis will be performed using SAS, a comprehensive database and statistical software in wide use in biomedical research. System and data integrity and system security and patient confidentiality will be given priority and maintained throughout the Center research.
This Cenler serves several important public health goals including identifying causes of mental disorders, targets for intervention, and better treatments. The Data and Methodology Core supports those goals by providing state of the art methodological and statistical support of Center projects.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 146 publications
