Eric Laber Named University Faculty Scholar

Eric Laber, assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at NC State, has been named a 2015-2016 University Faculty Scholar for his work in personalized medicine.

Chancellor Randy Woodson established the University Faculty Scholars program in 2012 to recognize and reward emerging academic leaders on the NC State faculty. Laber’s expertise is in statistical modeling and inference for complex and non-standard settings including sequential clinical trials, large observational datasets and streaming data. He is a key player in NC State’s Personalized Medicine Discovery Research Cluster, which seeks to deliver the right treatment for the right patient at the right time.

One of Laber’s primary goals is to close the research-practice gap that exists between methodological work on precision medicine and actual clinical practice. An important step towards this goal is finding clinical collaborators who are willing to buy into data-driven precision medicine.

“In the past few years, our group has formed some great relationships with clinicians and I think we’re starting to make some headway. We are currently involved in several multi-stage clinical trials focused on estimating optimal personalized treatment strategies,” Laber said.

Laber’s group has recently begun working on large-scale spatial-temporal decision problems for managing the spread of emerging infectious disease. The vision is to use real-time data on the spread of a disease to inform what, where, when and to whom interventions are applied.

“This is a really exciting area because it’s essentially wide-open. There are major open conceptual, theoretical, and computational problems,” Laber said. “We have a couple of pilot grants focused on identifying and articulating these problems. I hope that in the next five years we begin making progress on solving some of them!”

Emerging infectious diseases are responsible for high morbidity and mortality, economic damages to affected countries and are a major vulnerability for global stability. Technological advances have made it possible to collect, curate, and access large amounts of data on the progression of an infectious disease. Estimating effective treatment strategies using real-time data could have tremendous positive impact on public health.

“Any success that I have had has been the result of support and encouragement from the NC State Department of Statistics. We have the most magnanimous and collegial faculty in the world,” Laber said. “I would also like to acknowledge the students in my lab who work tirelessly and continually amaze me with their tenacity and creativity.”