Dr. Somnath Datta awarded NIH NIDCR grant

The Department of Biostatistics wishes to congratulate Dr. Somnath Datta on his recent award from the National Institute of Health NIDCR. The project, “A Novel Analysis Plan for the Caries and Fluorosis Data from the Iowa Fluoride Study”, is a 2-3 year study that will be led by Dr. Datta with co-investigators from the Universities of Louisville and Iowa. A brief abstract follows:

The overall goal of this proposal is to undertake a comprehensive secondary statistical analysis of data obtained from the Iowa Fluoride Study. In the United States, dental caries is a major chronic childhood disease. Nevertheless, our understanding of various risk factors is limited. The proposed research will integrate multi-year caries and fluorosis data to uncover new information that are undetectable using the simpler approaches previously undertaken for the IFS data. This research provides a greater understanding of the risk and preventative factors of dental caries and fluorosis. Last but not least, this work will enrich biostatistics methodological research in Bayesian approaches to statistical regression models for count data. More information can be found here.