Tanya P. Garcia, PhD

About

Excited about innovating practical and theoretically sound methods that address challenges in biomedical fields, Dr. Garcia has built a strong interdisciplinary research agenda. It involves national and international collaborations with neuroscientists and biologists, high-impact learning opportunities for students, and service work that promotes a future of diverse (bio)statisticians. Her research focuses on extracting maximal information from large, highly correlated data structures and has led to scientific discoveries in neurodegenerative diseases and the gut microbiome. Her teaching integrates these research activities with interactive, learner-centered projects that promote critical thinking. Her leadership in service activities involves promoting the success of underrepresented groups in (bio)statistics and providing her professional expertise regionally and internationally.

Dr. Garcia's research has attracted over $900,000 in competitive funding as Principal Investigator including grants from the NIH National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and Huntington's Disease Society of America. She publishes at a rate of 3 papers per year in top statistics journals including Journal of the American Statistical Association, Annals of Applied Statistics, and Bioinformatics. Her work is cited (inter)nationally by scholars in United States, France, Australia, Hong Kong, Canada, among others. She has earned competitive awards including the 2017-2018 NINDS Mentoring Institute for Neuroscience Diversity Scholars Fellowship; a fully-funded, visiting scholar invitation to the University of Sydney in 2012; and the 2011 American Statistical Association Gertrude M. Cox Award (awarded to two of 1200 applicants in North America). She has presented in over 35 invited department seminars and invited (inter)national conference sessions (rate of 5 per year).

Her research innovates new statistical methods that solve important neuroscience and biomedical problems and advances the underlying theory of those methods. Her work has contributed to four exciting areas: prediction models, model selection for high-dimensional data, regression models with measurement error, mean-covariance modeling for longitudinal data.

Honors and Awards

Plenary Speaker at the 39th International Symposium on Forecasting
2019

Mentoring Institute for Neuroscience Diversity Scholar
2017-2018

Gertrude M Cox Awardee
2011, American Statistical Association

Teaching Interests

Survival Analysis
Semiparametric Theory
Longitudinal Data Analysis

Research Activities

High-Dimensional Variable Selection,
Longitudinal Data Analysis,
Neurodegenerative Diseases,
Nonparametric Models,
Prediction Models,
Semiparametric Models,
Survival Analysis

Service Activities

Associate Editor of Biostatistics, 2019-Present

Board Member:
- Huntington Disease Society of America Scientific Advisory Board, 2020-Present
- ENAR Regional Advisory Board, 2019-2021

Chair of ASA Biometrics Section Strategic Initiatives Grant, 2018-Present

ENAR Biometrics Section Representative, 2017-2018

Member:
- NSF CAREER Panel Reviewer, 2019
- NSF Statistics Panel Reviewer, 2019
- NSERC Mathematics and Statistics Discovery Program Reviewer, 2018
- E-Rare Transnational Grant Reviewer, 2018

Organizer for:
- StatFest 2020
- Invited Session for the ISNPS 2018
- Invited Session for ENAR 2019
- Invited Session for Joint Statistical Meetings 2017
- Invited Session for  Brazilian Regional Meeting 2016
- Invited Session for ENAR 2016
- Invited Session for SACNAS 2015
- Invited Session for WNAR 2015

Faculty Mentor for ADVANCE at Texas A&M University, 2019-Present

Key Publications

Dynamic landmark prediction for mixture data. Garcia, T.P. and Parast, L. (2021). Biostatistics, 22(3), 558-574.

Time-varying Proportional Odds Model for Mega-analysis of Clustered Event Times. Garcia, T.P., Marder, K. and Wang, Y. (2019). Biostatistics, 20(1), 126-146.

Disease progression in Huntington Disease: an analysis of multiple longitudinal outcomes. Garcia, T.P., Wang, Y., Shoulson, I., Paulsen, J.S., and Marder, K. (2018). Journal of Huntington Disease, 7(4), 337-344.

Education