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INFORMATION FOR

Scientific Cores

Data Coordinating Core (DCC)

  • Cynthia Brandt, MD, MPH

    Professor of Biomedical Informatics & Data Science; Vice Chair for Education, Biomedical Informatics & Data Science; Professor, Biostatistics

    Dr. Brandt completed a general Preventive Medicine residency at Madigan Army Medical Center in 1989 and a post-doctoral fellowship sponsored by the National Library of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine in 1997. She is board certified in Preventive Medicine and Clinical Informatics. Her research is interdisciplinary and focuses on issues related to the design, development and use of informatics tools in the domain of clinical research, as well as health services research.
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  • James Dziura, MPH, PhD

    Professor of Emergency Medicine and of Biostatistics and of Medicine (Endocrinology); Co-Director, Yale Center for Analytical Sciences (YCAS); Director, Yale Data Coordinating Center; Professor, Biostatistics

    Jim is a Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at YMS. As a biostatistician at Yale since 2002 he has co-authored over 200 peer-reviewed articles with a diverse group of Yale investigators. Dr. Dziura also serves as the Deputy Director of both the Yale Center for Analytical Sciences (YCAS) and the Yale Data Coordinating Center (YDCC) in the Yale School of Public Health. He has been active in training young investigators, both individually (as a mentor and statistical resource for K-awardees, post-doctoral fellows, residents and Master’s students) and in the classroom (where he has developed a graduate-level course and several workshops on biostatistics in clinical research). His primary research interests are in the coordination of multicenter clinical trials. Over the past ten years he has overseen data coordinating and biostatistical efforts for several trials. Notably, he served as the PI of the data coordinating center for the RUPP Autism Network study of Guanfacine for the treatment of hyperactivity. He is the Director of the Data Coordinating Center for the Autism Biomarkers Consortium for Clinical Trials (ABC-CT), a multicenter longitudinal study developing reproducible experimental biomarkers (e.g. from EEG, eye tracking) for use as stratification factors and outcomes in clinical trials.He is a senior biostatistician (and unblinded statistician for the DSMB) for the Data Coordinating Center of a large pragmatic cluster-randomized trial for the prevention of serious fall injuries (STRIDE) in 6,000 older persons from 86 health care practices.
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Data Acquisition and Analysis Core (DAAC)

Seattle Children’s Research Institute - Sara Webb, PhD

Sara Webb

Director, Data Acquisition and Analytics Core

Sara Jane Webb, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington & Seattle Children’s Research Institute. Dr. Webb’s research focuses on the functional neurobiology and development of information processing in individuals with autism spectrum disorder and other developmental disorders, as well as in individuals with typical development. She currently uses EEG, event-related potentials (ERPs), eye-tracking, and behavioral measures to study how children encode, store, and retrieve information about visual images such as faces, and how these processes are impacted by developmental disruptions. She has significant experience in EEG data acquisition across multi-site projects, including the ACE GENDAAR Network and the FAST AS Trial. She has written the only methods paper in EEG and Autism and is director of the EEG Analytics Core for GENDAAR. As founder of the EEG/MEG in Autism Special Interest Group, Dr. Webb has significant experience in implementing EEG with children with ASD.

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Yale University - Frederick Shic, PhD

Co-director, DAAC, Co-Director, Eye Tracking Workgroup

Frederick Shic, PhD is Associate Professor in Pediatrics at University of Washington, an Investigator at the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, and director of the Seattle Children’s Innovative Technologies Laboratory (SCITL). Dr. Shic has significant experience in using eye-tracking (ET) to study visual social attention in ASD, computational modeling to describe gaze patterns in terms of perceptual characteristics, the development of gaze contingent interactive technologies, and the development of specialized software applications for education, mental health, and children ASD. His experience includes large data handling, including both scientific data sets associated with experimental technologies such as eye tracking, as well as complex phenotypic data including behavioral assessment.

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UCLA - Catherine Sugar, PhD

Director, Statistical Analytics
Catherine Sugar, PhD

Catherine A. Sugar, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Departments of Biostatistics, (UCLA Fielding School of Public Health), Statistics (UCLA College of Letter, Arts and Sciences) and Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences (David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA). She is also the director of SIStat, the biostatistics core for UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, which will provide the statistical methodology and data analysis support for this consortium through the Data Acquisition and Analysis Core. Dr. Sugar directs the statistics and data cores for multiple major neuroscience centers at UCLA including the Autism Center of Excellence (ACE) on Biomarkers of Developmental Trajectories and Treatment in ASD, the ACE Network on Adaptive Interventions for Minimally Verbal Children with ASD, and the multi-site Research and Development initiative FAST FAIL Trials in Autism, as well as the recently completed Autism Intervention Research Network and the NIH roadmap Consortium for Neuropsychiatric Phenomics.

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Duke University – Maura S. Devito, PhD

Assistant Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Duke University

Dr. Devito obtained her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2014. She is now an Assistant Professor in the department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, specifically the Psychiatry, Child & Family Mental Health & Community Psychiatry division at Duke University.