Research Services provides consultation, training, and tutorials to support computing and research at Boston College. The Research Services staff has expertise in statistics, statistical software, qualitative research, surveys, GIS, scientific computation, data analysis, computational mathematics, and visualization. We also provide assistance with coding, databases, Web technologies, and administration and consultation for research oriented computing hardware based within the departments and institutes.
The Research Services staff provides consultation, training, and tutorials to support computing and research at Boston College.
Matt Gregas
Research Services Director
Matt Gregas has twelve years of experience as a biostatisitican. Upon receiving his doctoral degree at the University of Minnesota, where his research focused on statistical methods for estimating the firing rate of a single neuron, he spent two years as a research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. There he continued his work on statistical analysis of neural data. In addition we was part of a research team studying the natural history of Alzhiemer's disease. In 2007 he joined Children's Hospital Boston as a Senior Biostatistician and an Instructor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Gregas has extensive experience in Biomedical research. He has served as the project biostatistician on several clinical trials. The focus of these trials were new interventions for autism spectrum disorders and neo-natal seizures. He has collaborated with scientists primarily in pediatric neurology. He has published articles on epilespy, autism, treatment of neonatal seizures, muscular dystrophies, and stroke. His statistical interests are semiparametric regression and curve-fitting, non-linear regression, and longitudinal data analysis.
Selected Publications:
- Peters JM, Sahin M, Vogel-Farley VK, Jeste SS, Nelson CA 3rd, Gregas MC, Prabhu SP, Scherrer B, Warfield SK: (2012) Loss of white matter microstructural integrity is associated with adverse neurological outcome in tuberous sclerosis complex: Acad Radiol. 2012 Jan 19(1): 17-25.
- Rutkove SB, Shefner JM, Gregas M, Butler H, Caracciolo J, Lin C, Fogerson PM, Mongiovi P, Darras BT (2010): Characterizing spinal muscular atrophy with electrical impedance myography.Muscle Nerve. 2010 Dec; 42(6): 915-21.
- Krishnan ML, Commowick O, Jeste SS, Weisenfeld N, Hans A, Gregas MC, Sahin M, Warfield SK. (2010): Diffusion features of white matter in tuberous sclerosis with tractograph: . Pediatr Neurol. 2010 Feb;42(2):101-6.
- O'Leary H, Gregas MC, Limperopoulos C, Zaretskaya I, Bassan H, Soul JS, Di Salvo DN, du Plessis AJ (2009): Elevated cerebral pressure passivity is associated with prematurity-related intracranial hemorrhage: Pediatrics. 2009 Jul; 124(1): 302-9
Education:
- Ph.D. Statistics. University of Minnesota
- B.S. Mathematical Sciences. Michigan Technological University
Rani Dalgin
Senior Statistical Consultant &
Manager Graduate Student Assistants
Rani has over 25 years experience as a clinician and statistical research consultant in the public, private, and government sectors. Rani has been a consultant at Boston College since 1998 and has customized discipline specific and general statistics courses for faculty and graduate students on a variety of statistical topics including introductions to SPSS, Stata, and SAS, Regression, Survival Analysis, HLM, AMOS, and in conjunction with the O'Neill Library Staff: "Access to Dataset Repositories for Social Science Research."
Rani's current research interest include Gerontology, Measures of Psychological Resiliency in Adolescents and Adults, Quantifying Success Predictors in Hospital Based Social Work Practice, and Quantifying Success Predictors for Homeschooling and Distance Learning in K through 12 students.
Selected Publication:
"Case Management as Management" with Dr. Nancy Veeder, Journal of Social Service Research, St. Louis, MO, January 2005.
Education:
- A.B., M.S.W., and M.Ed. in Counseling Psychology, Washington University in St. Louis
Melissa McTernan
Senior Research Statistician
Melissa McTernan holds a Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology from the University of California, Davis. Prior to joining Boston College, she was an Assistant Professor at California State University in Sacramento. Melissa's primary research interests are in the area of applied statistics for the social and behavioral sciences. Some areas in which Melissa has expertise are methods for zero-inflated and longitudinal data, and random-effect models. She has experience with R, SAS, SPSS, Mplus, as well as Markdown and LaTeX.
Education:
- B.S. in Psychology, University of Mary Washington
- Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology, University of California, Davis
Sriram Natarajan
Graduate Student Assistant
Sriram is a Phd candidate in economics. Before pursuing his doctoral studies, he worked with Cognizant Technology Solutions in creating B2B and B2C apps which run on iOS. He has served as an instructor for Statistics and Econometrics lab courses using Stata. His research at Boston college focuses on matching and mechanism design.
Yixin Pan
Data Scientist
Yixin has a Master's degree in Data Science from University of Rochester. Prior to joining Boston College, she has working experience of Statistics and Data Science in biostatistics industry. Yixin has strong interested and background in the areas of Machine Learning, Statistical Analysis and Data Science. She has knowledge of Python, R, SAS, SQL and Tableau.
Education:
- M.A in Data Science, University of Rochester
- M.S in Chemical Engineering, University of Rochester
- B.A in Chemistry, Tianjin University
Wei Lucy Qiu
Senior Scientific Computational Consultant
Wei has experience as a Scientific Researcher and Scientific Software Engineer in both academic setting and industry. Prior to joining Boston College in 2009, she worked for Meteorological Services of Canada, Mass General Hospital, Hospira Inc and Weather Services International, where she invented scientific algorithms, developed software tools and created real-time embedded applications.
Wei has expertise in open source and commercial software engineering, cross platform computing, and real-time embedded system. She is skilled in programming with C/C++, MATLAB, PERL and other languages.
Education:
- M.S. in Computer Science, University of Western Ontario in Canada.
- B.S. in Applied Chemistry, Jiangxi Science & Technology Normal University
Selected Publications:
- Kuo, B., Itzhak, A., Qiu, W., Urma, D., Kwong, K., Mao, J., Rosen, B. Dynamic Imaging of the Brain Activity During Feeding and Epigastria Discomfort/Pain with a Physiological Gastric Stimulus. Gastroenterology, 2005; 128, 4 (Suppl. 2): A-372.
- W. Qiu, R.E. Mercer, J.L. Barron (2001), 3D Storm Tracking in 3D Doppler Precipitation Reflectivity Datasets. Irish Machine Vision and Image Processing conference (IMVIP2001), pp79-86 (best paper award).