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Ravi Varadhan

Ravi Varadhan, PhD

Highlights

Languages

  • English

Gender

Male

Johns Hopkins Affiliations:

  • Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Faculty

About Ravi Varadhan

Primary Academic Title

Professor of Oncology

Background

Dr. Varadhan is a professor of oncology in the Quantitative Sciences Division at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins. He is also a core faculty member in the Center on Aging and Health and the Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness. Dr. Varadhan is a well-known expert in several areas of biostatistics. He is an expert in the area of patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR), where he focuses on developing statistical methods that inform evidence-based individualized medicine. He has a particular interest in Bayesian methods for exploring heterogeneity of treatment effect (HTE). He has developed numerous algorithms and software for solving high-dimensional optimization problems arising in statistical modeling. He has also made important contributions to understanding the etiology of frailty and physical resilience in older adults. He is a Brookdale Fellow of Leadership in Aging.

Centers and Institutes

Aging and Health, Center on

Contact for Research Inquiries

550 N. Broadway
Suite 1103-A
Baltimore, MD 21205

Phone: (410) 502-2619
Fax: (410) 614-9625

Research Interests

Computational algorithms and software for convergence acceleration, Modeling approaches for studying the etiology of geriatric frailty, physical resilience to stressors, Statistical methods for the analysis of heterogeneous treatment effects

Research Summary

Dr. Varadhan is a well-known expert in several areas of biostatistics. He is an expert in the area of patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR), where he focuses on developing statistical methods that inform evidence-based individualized medicine. He has a particular interest in Bayesian methods for exploring heterogeneity of treatment effect (HTE). He has also developed algorithms and software for solving high-dimensional optimization problems arising in statistical modeling. Dr. Varadhan developed a class of algorithms called SQUAREM (squared extrapolation methods) that accelerate the convergence of expectation-maximization (EM) and minorization-maximization (MM) algorithms. He has written several R packages for solving various types of problems in statistical modeling and in optimization, including turboEM, for which he received the 2012 John M. Chambers award for best statistical software. Dr. Varadhan has also made significant contributions to the etiology of frailty in older adults.

Selected Publications

  • Ambinder A, Jain T, Tsai HL, Horowitz MM, Jones RJ, Varadhan R. HLA-matching with PTCy: a reanalysis of a CIBMTR dataset with propensity score matching and donor age. Blood Adv. 2022 Jul 26;6(14):4335-4346. doi: 10.1182/bloodadvances.2022007741. PMID: 35613462; PMCID: PMC9327541

  • Henderson NC, Varadhan R. Damped Anderson acceleration with restarts and monotonicity control for accelerating EM and EM-like algorithms. J Comput Graph Stat. 2019;28(4):834-846

  • Henderson NC, Louis TA, Rosner GL, Varadhan R. Individualized treatment effects with censored data via fully nonparametric Bayesian accelerated failure time models. Biostatistics. 2020 Jan 1;21(1):50-68. doi: 10.1093/biostatistics/kxy028. PMID: 30052809; PMCID: PMC8972560

  • Lanzkron S, Little J, Wang H, Field JJ, Shows JR, Haywood C Jr, Saheed M, Proudford M, Robertson D, Kincaid A, Burgess L, Green C, Seufert R, Brooks J, Piehet A, Griffin B, Arnold N, Frymark S, Wallace M, Abu Al Hamayel N, Huang CY, Segal JB, Varadhan R. Treatment of Acute Pain in Adults With Sickle Cell Disease in an Infusion Center Versus the Emergency Department : A Multicenter Prospective Cohort Study. Ann Intern Med. 2021 Sep;174(9):1207-1213. doi: 10.7326/M20-7171. Epub 2021 Jul 6. Erratum in: Ann Intern Med. 2021 Aug 3; PMID: 34224261

  • Schoenborn NL, Blackford AL, Joshu CE, Boyd CM, Varadhan R. Life expectancy estimates based on comorbidities and frailty to inform preventive care. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2022 Jan;70(1):99-109. doi: 10.1111/jgs.17468. Epub 2021 Sep 18. PMID: 34536287; PMCID: PMC8742754

Expertise

Education

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Ph.D., 2004

University of Toledo

Ph.D., 1993