News and Highlights
August 2011
Faculty Promotions
Hassan Ghomrawi, PhD, MPH, has been promoted to Assistant Professor of Public Health in the Division of Health Policy. He is also an Outcomes Research Scientist at the Hospital for Special Surgery. Dr. Ghomrawi earned his Bachelors and Masters of Public Health degrees from the American University of Beirut. He then earned his PhD in Health Services Research and Policy with a concentration in outcomes research from the University of Minnesota. Dr. Ghomrawi specializes in surgical outcomes research, with particular interests in the field of orthopedics. He holds a K99/R00 career development award from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to study the impact of discordant patient-surgeon expectations on joint arthroplasty outcomes. He is also currently a co-investigator on the Weill Cornell Centers for Education and Research on Therapeutics (CERT), which is evaluating outcomes in orthopedic and medical devices in collaboration with researchers at the Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS).
Samprit Banerjee, PhD, MStat, has been promoted to Assistant Professor of Biostatistics in Public Health. Dr. Banerjee joined the faculty at Cornell after completing his PhD in Biostatistics from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He had previously completed his Bachelors and Masters degrees in Statistics from the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata, India. While pursuing his PhD, Dr. Banerjee developed MCMC algorithms to jointly analyze multiple correlated traits to detect pleiotropy and pleiotropy vs. close linkage. The core research interests of Dr. Banerjee include statistical models for high dimensional data, covariance matrices in high dimensions, Bayesian variable selection and MCMC and also application of the same to genetic and genomics. At Cornell, Dr. Banerjee is collaborating with Dr. Mark Rubin's laboratory to develop statistical methods to detect copy number variants from micro-array data, detect mutations from sequencing data and also analyze various kinds of data related to prostate cancer. He was involved in 14 peer reviewed publications in various roles including lead author, and he has also co-authored two book chapters. He has lectured in Introduction to Biostatistics for medical residents. He is a reviewer for a number of journals, among them Bioinformatics, Statistical Applications in Genetics and Molecular Biology, Genetics, Human Heredity, IEEE Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference.
