Lin receives prestigious MERIT Award to continue research in survival analysis

Dr. Danyu Lin

Dr. Lin’s grant was originally funded by the NIH in 1992 and competitively renewed in 1997, 2001, and 2005, at which time it was converted to the MERIT Award. MERIT awards provide long-term stable support to investigators whose research competence and productivity are distinctly superior and who are likely to continue to perform in an outstanding manner, according to the NIH. The provision of long-term stable support is expected to foster continued creativity and spare the investigators the administrative burdens associated with preparation and submission of full-length research grant applications. This may allow investigators the opportunity to take greater risks, be more adventurous in their lines of inquiry, or take the time to develop new techniques.

The broad, long-term objectives of this research are to develop semiparametric regression models and associated inference procedures for the statistical analysis of “censored data,” a form of incomplete information about the development of disease or death, commonly encountered in biomedical studies. For the last 17 years, this NIH grant has enabled Dr. Lin to develop highly innovative statistical methods for the analysis of censored data. His methods have been published in leading statistical and genetic journals, and widely used by biomedical researchers.

Dr. Lin is an internationally recognized leader in the field of survival analysis, which is the central focus of this research. He has collaborated with medical investigators on cancer, AIDS, psychiatric, and cardiovascular disease research. Dr. Lin was awarded the Mortimer Spiegelman gold medal from the American Public Health Association in 1999 for outstanding contributions to health statistics and was recognized by Thomson ISI as one of the most highly cited researchers in mathematics. He is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He currently serves as an Associate Editor of several top-tier biostatistical journals. For more information on Dr. Lin and his research, please visit http://www.bios.unc.edu/~lin/