Sara Lopez-Pintado

PhD

Associate Professor

Public Health and Health Sciences


Research Interests

Biostatistics, functional and imaging data analysis, nonparametric statistics methods, mental health applications

Overview

Dr. Lopez-Pintado has been focused since the beginning of her career on the study, development and teaching of statistical methodologies and their applications to fields such as Biomedicine. She obtained her Ph.D. in Statistics from the University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain. She spent one year as an Instructor and Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Statistics at Rutgers University, and after returning to Spain she was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Quantitative Methods at University Pablo de Olavide in Seville. In 2007-2008 she visited the Department of Biostatistics in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, supported by a grant from the Spanish Government. Subsequently, in 2010 Dr. Lopez-Pintado was appointed as Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at Columbia University. During her time as an Assistant Professor at Columbia, she combined methodological and collaborative research with teaching and service duties.

She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Sciences at Northeastern University. She was awarded with a R21 grant from National Institute of Mental health at NIH and has been recently awarded with an NSF collaborative grant on novel statistics methods for complex object data. Her research is focused on the development of robust nonparametric and computational methods for ranking, visualizing and analyzing high-dimensional data such as functions, medical images, time series, and non-Euclidean object data, such as fMRI brain connectivity matrices. She has published several relevant and well cited papers in the field of robust functional data analysis. Dr. Lopez-Pintado is interested in collaborating in interdisciplinary research projects in Biomedicine. She is also passionate about teaching statistics and its applications to undergraduate and graduate students.

Selected Publications

Lopez-Pintado S, Kun Q (2020). A depth-based global envelope test for comparing two groups of functions with applications to biomedical data. Statistics in Medicine, 40 (7), 1639-1652. DOI: 10.1002/sim.8861

Lopez-Pintado S, Wrobel J (2017). Robust nonparametric tests for imaging data based on data depth. Stat, 6, 405-419. DOI: 10.1002/sta4.168

Wilson PT, Baiden F, Brooks JC, Morris MC, Giessler K, Punguyire D, Apio G, Agyeman-Ampromfi A, Lopez-Pintado S, Sylverken J, Nyarko-Jectey K, Tagbor H, Moresky RT (2017). Continuous positive airway pressure for children with undifferentiated respiratory distress in Ghana: an open-label, cluster, crossover trial. Lancet Global Health 5: 615-623.

Lopez-Pintado S, Romo J, Torrente A (2010). Robust depth-based tools for the analysis of gene expression data. Biostatistics 11(2): 254-264.

Lopez-Pintado S, Romo J (2009). On the concept of depth for functional data. Journal of the American Statistical Association 104: 486-503.

Selected Public Service

Associate Editor of Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics since August 1, 2018.

Member of several Committees in the Department of Health Sciences at Northeastern University since September 2018. Admission Committee of Ph.D. in Population Health, Qualifying Exam Committee, and member of the Bouve Research Core Task Force

CMStatistics 2019/2020/2021, Program Organizer and session chair. Member of the Scientific Committee for the International Conference CMStatistics since 2019.

Participated in NIH and NSF grant review panels since 2018. Also, reviewer for several Journals: JCGS, CSDA, JASA, Test, Environmetrics, Technometrics.

Senior consultant from 2015 to 2018 in Clinical and Translational Research Award at Irving Institute at Columbia University.

Courses

PHTH 5210: Biostatistics in Public Health

PHTH 2210: Foundation of Biostatistics

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