Dr. S. (Roula) Tsonaka

I am an Assistant Professor in Medical Statistics. I earned my PhD in Mathematics from the Leuven Biostatistics and Statistical Bioinformatics Centre at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, specializing in methods for handling missing data in clinical and epidemiological studies. After joining the Statistical Genetics group as a postdoctoral researcher in 2009, I became an Assistant Professor in 2015. I teach in the MSc Statistics and Data Science program and the Boerhaave Master, covering advanced statistical methods for longitudinal and multilevel data. Additionally, I provide statistical consulting to biomedical researchers across departments. I have served on the editorial boards of Biometrics, Biometrical Journal, and Statistical Modelling and am the Publicity Officer for the Dutch Region of the International Biometric Society.

My research focuses on developing statistical methodology for longitudinal studies to solve clinical and epidemiological problems. Motivated by my close collaborations with clinical departments, I have identified limitations in existing methods and introduced solutions to tackle complex research questions. One such example is my collaboration with the Human Genetics and Neurology departments in the context of Duchene muscular dystrophy. The need for feasible solutions for high-dimensional longitudinal data hampered the identification of biomarkers that track disease progression and predict disease milestones. This work has received NIH funding to support my research further. Currently, I am expanding my work to model dynamic associations between multiple longitudinal clinical parameters.