Yan Ma, Ph.D., M.A., M.S., is a Professor in and Vice Chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics and Associate Director of the Biostatistics and Epidemiology Consulting Service at the George Washington University (GWU) Milken Institute School of Public Health. He joined the Milken Institute School of Public Health in 2014 from Hospital for Special Surgery, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, where he had been Assistant Professor of Biostatistics since 2008. Dr. Ma received his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Rochester.
As a biostatistician, Dr. Ma has provided a wide range of traditional and cutting-edge statistical consulting services to biomedical and public health investigators. His research focuses on developing innovative statistical methodology for complex analytic problems arising from this collaborative research. He has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications in top journals such as Biometrics, Statistics in Medicine, Psychometrika, Health Services Research, JAMA, Anesthesiology, Anesthesia & Analgesia, Circulation Research, Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research, Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery, Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine. He has received two R01 grants from AHRQ and NIH for the development of statistical methods for handling missing data in health disparities research.
Dr. Ma has been an Editorial Board Member of The American Journal of Public Health and an Associate Editor for two journals published by the American Statistical Association (ASA), The American Statistician and Statistical Analysis and Data Mining, as well as an Academic Editor for PLOS ONE. He has served as a merit review panel member for the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) multiple times since 2016, as well as for the US Department of Veterans Affairs in 2017. He is a founding member and chair (2017) of the Junior Statistician Mentoring Program Committee, ASA Section on Statistics in Epidemiology. He was appointed to ASA’s Mentoring Award Committee (three-year term: 2019-2022) and served on Eastern North American Region (ENAR) Regional Advisory Board (three-year term: 2017~2019). In 2010, he was a recipient of Statistics in Epidemiology Young Investigator Award by the American Statistical Association. In 2012, Dr. Ma and his collaborators won the esteemed Team Science Award from the Association for Clinical Research Training, American Federation for Medical Research, Association for Patient Oriented Research, and Society for Clinical and Translational Science . This award recognizes the team's success in translation of research discoveries into clinical practice. In 2017, he was selected to receive research fellowship from the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) Research Participation Program at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. He was the 2017 winner of the Achievement in Academia Award for outstanding contributions to statistics and public health from the Applied Public Health Statistics Section of American Public Health Association.