Links:
Personal Web Site

Biography:

Laura H. Gunn earned her B.A. in mathematics from Jacksonville University in Jacksonville, FL: she earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in Statistics and Decision Sciences from Duke University in Durham, NC. She spent close to two years during her graduate studies at the National Institute of Environmental Health Science as an Intramural Research Training Fellow developing statistical methods for Bayesian order-restrictions applied to biomedical applications. Such applications include unimodal constraints on hormone trajectories with unknown peaks in women’s menstrual cycles as well as ordering in hazard functions among non-decreasing hazards across dose groups in a toxicology study.

Laura joined the Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health in 2004 where she assisted in developing the Biostatistics program as Program Director of Biostatistics for two and a half years. She has served for one and a half years as co-chair of the Biopharmaceutical Applied Statistics Symposium (BASS), an annual internationally-recognized conference promoting research and education in statistical tools applied to pharmaceuticals. Laura collaborates on research projects with faculty in- and out-side of the college. Her collaborative projects include, but are not limited to, the following: trends in infant mortality among Georgia residents between 1995 and 2003; breast, colon, and prostate cancer screening status, health behaviors, and preferences in five Georgia counties; demographic and risk behavior correlates of smoking among college students; and evaluation of college students’ knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors regarding low-carbohydrate foods and diets. Some of Laura’s biostatistical research interests include: Bayesian statistics, order-restricted inferential methods, regression analysis, survival analysis, and hierarchical modeling.