Biostatistics and Epidemiology Methodology Core

The JHU CFAR Biostatistics and Epidemiology Methodology (BEM) Core provides leadership and support of collaborative, educational, and research opportunities for the Johns Hopkins HIV/AIDS community to promote and support innovative HIV-related research.

What services do we offer?

The BEM Core provides state-of-the-art epidemiological and biostatistical services in support of innovative HIV/AIDS research to improve the understanding of the pathogenesis, prevention and management of HIV disease and its complications by:

  • Linking investigators with BEM Core members who can contribute their expertise in HIV/AIDS epidemiology and methodology, including the construction of study protocols and selection of study design, constructing inclusion/exclusion criteria, working with statistical programmers and data management staff, developing and executing statistical analysis plans, writing research reports and manuscripts and contributing to scientific presentations.
  • Providing support for data management through the JHBC Data Informatics Services Core.

Education

The BEM Core trains and mentors staff, students, fellows, and junior investigators (with particular focus on Sub-Saharan Africa) in state-of-the-art population and quantitative methods used in HIV research, stimulates inclusion of these methods in new studies through consultations and educational initiatives that inform the community of recent advances in these methods, and to help community members understand and interpret new epidemiological and biostatistical research.

Requesting Support

You can click HERE to request services, or equivalently, in the red box in the lower left of the page, to be sent to a request form.  Among other items, it will ask for information that we need to report to NIH on a quarterly basis. 

Our first priority is to help investigators who are relatively new to HIV-related research as they apply for funding.  It is best to be meeting with a biostatistician at least a month before an application is due, and two months is much more preferable.  That is because the statistician best-suited for a project may be traveling or inundated with other projects at the time of the request.  Also, it can take considerable back-and-forth dialogue to translate research questions into precise sample size and analytic goals.

If an investigator has already received funding and needs collaboration for implementing or analysing a study, presumably the funding (when coming from outside the Hopkins institutions) will already have a line for statistical support.  It is best to identify a biostatistician to be working with a project very soon after the letter of award has been received; waiting until a week before a randomization needs to be performed or an abstract is due will rarely have optimal results.  The BEM Core can assist with identifying the right person to be associated with your project.

For more information about our services, please contact our Core Manager Parastu Kasaie at jhucfarbem@jhu.edu. To request a service, please fill out this form.

 

Check out the BEM Core's most recent workshop, "Creating Projects and Managing Data in REDCap”

In this workshop, participants learned the steps needed to set up and configure a new REDCap project. The topics covered included:  types of projects and their related settings, creating data collection instruments that use branching logic and validation, adding events for longitudinal projects, creating repeating instruments, and the process for making changes once in production mode. For managing data in REDCap, participants learned how to import and export data, check for data quality issues, and use the fields comments for documenting.