Elizabeth Ray DeLong is an American

biostatistician Biostatistics (also known as biometry) are the development and application of statistical methods to a wide range of topics in biology. It encompasses the design of biological experiments, the collection and analysis of data from those experimen ...

. She is a professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics at

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist Jam ...

, where she chairs the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics and is affiliated with the Duke Clinical Research Institute and Duke Cancer Institute.

Education

DeLong graduated from the

University of Maine The University of Maine (UMaine or UMO) is a public land-grant research university in Orono, Maine. It was established in 1865 as the land-grant college of Maine and is the flagship university of the University of Maine System. It is classifie ...

in 1969, and earned a master's degree there in 1970. She completed her Ph.D. in 1979 at the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United State ...

. Her dissertation, supervised by

Pranab K. Sen Pranab Kumar Sen (born 7 November 1937 in Calcutta, India)Curriculum vitae
, retriev ...

, was ''Estimation of General Parameters using Progressively Truncated U-Statistics''.

Career

After completing her doctorate, she joined Duke as a statistician in Community and Family Medicine and in the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center in 1979. In 1987, she left academia to work in industry as directory of biostatistics at

Quintiles IQVIA, formerly Quintiles and IMS Health, Inc., is an American multinational company serving the combined industries of health information technology and clinical research. IQVIA is a provider of biopharmaceutical development and commercial outs ...

, but returned as an assistant professor in Community and Family Medicine in 1991, and added a joint appointment in Anesthesiology in 1996. In 2001 she moved to the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics. She has been chair of the department since 2007. In 2013, DeLong was elected as a

Fellow of the American Statistical Association Like many other academic professional societies, the American Statistical Association (ASA) uses the title of Fellow of the American Statistical Association as its highest honorary grade of membership. The number of new fellows per year is limited ...

Research interests

Her interests in the applications of statistics include

outcomes research Outcomes research is a branch of public health research which studies the end results ( outcomes) of the structure and processes of the health care system on the health and well-being of patients and populations. According to one medical outcomes an ...

and

comparative effectiveness research Comparative effectiveness research (CER) is the direct comparison of existing health care interventions to determine which work best for which patients and which pose the greatest benefits and harms. The core question of comparative effectiveness ...

, and she has also published highly cited work in

mathematical statistics Mathematical statistics is the application of probability theory, a branch of mathematics, to statistics, as opposed to techniques for collecting statistical data. Specific mathematical techniques which are used for this include mathematical an ...

on nonparametric methods for comparing the areas under correlated

receiver operating characteristic A receiver operating characteristic curve, or ROC curve, is a graph of a function, graphical plot that illustrates the diagnostic ability of a binary classifier system as its discrimination threshold is varied. The method was originally develope ...

curves.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Delong, Elizabeth Ray Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American statisticians Women statisticians Biostatisticians University of Maine alumni University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill alumni Duke University faculty Fellows of the American Statistical Association