Susan Shortreed, PhD
Assistant Investigator
206-287-2088
shortreed.s@ghc.org
Recent publications
Curriculum vitae (CV)
Research interests and experience
- Biostatistics: analysis of observational studies; methods for overcoming missing data; computational statistics and algorithms
- Chronic illness management: biostatistics; developing personalized dynamic treatment strategies
- Medication use and patient safety: biostatistics; data mining; clustering
Susan Shortreed's research brings together statistics and machine learning (ML) methods to health science problems, with a special emphasis on missing-data analysis. Much of her methodological work is focused on practical ways to overcome the challenge of missing data both in clinical trials and observational studies. She seeks to evaluate and improve methods for making statistical inference from observational data as well as from randomized clinical trials with missing data. She is also concerned with developing new machine learning methods and extending best-practice current methods, specifically in the development of personalized dynamic treatment strategies, clustering, classification methods, and model selection/variable weighting methods.
Dr. Shortreed joined GHRI after two years as a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. At McGill, she worked with computer scientists and statisticians on evaluating and improving methods for developing personalized dynamic treatment strategies. Personalized dynamic treatment strategies are treatment strategies that respond to changes in a patient's symptoms and response to treatment and are especially important for the management of chronic disease and mental illness. Specifically, Dr. Shortreed focused on developing personalized dynamic treatment strategies for patients with schizophrenia.
Prior to her position at McGill University, Dr. Shortreed spent two years as a biostatistician research scientist in the Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She worked with epidemiologists on assessing the impact of physical activity on cardiovascular disease and worked with doctors in the application areas of low back pain, incontinence, and arthritis.
During her graduate career in the Department of Statistics at the University of Washington, Dr. Shortreed was an NSF Vertical Integration for Graduate Research and Education (VIGRE) Fellow. She was also a Blalock Fellow in the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences.
Recent publications
Shortreed SM, Laber E, Lizotte DJ, Stroup TS, Pineau J, Murphy SA. Informing sequential clinical decision-making through reinforcement learning: an empirical study. Mach Learn. 2011;84(1-2):109-36. PubMed
Abdullah A, Stoelwinder J, Shortreed S, Wolfe R, Stevenson C, Walls H, de Courten M, Peeters A. The duration of obesity and the risk of type 2 diabetes. Public Health Nutr. 2011 Jan;14(1):119-26. Epub 2010 Jun 29. PubMed
Shortreed SM, Forbes AB. Missing data in the exposure of interest and marginal structural models: a simulation study based on the Framingham Heart Study. Stat Med. 2010 Feb 20;29(4):431-43. PubMed
Urquhart DM, Shortreed S, Davis SR, Cicuttini FM, Bell RJ. Are low levels of low back pain intensity and disability associated with reduced well-being in community-based women? Climacteric. 2009 Jun;12(3):266-75. PubMed
Brennan SL, Cicuttini FM, Shortreed S, Forbes A, Jones G, Stuckey SL, Wluka AE. Women lose patella cartilage at a faster rate than men: a 4.5 year cohort study of subjects with knee OA. Maturitas. 2010 Nov;67(3):270-4. Epub 2010 Aug 12. PubMed
Botlero R, Davis SR, Urquhart DM, Shortreed S, Bell RJ. Age-specific prevalence of, and factors associated with, different types of urinary incontinence in community-dwelling Australian women assessed with a validated questionnaire. Maturitas. 2009 Feb 20;62(2):134-9. Epub 2009 Jan 31. PubMed
Magliano DJ, Shaw JE, Shortreed SM, Nusselder WJ, Liew D, Barr EL, Zimmet PZ, Peeters A. Lifetime risk and projected population prevalence of diabetes. Diabetologia. 2008 Dec;51(12):2179-86. Epub 2008 Sep 23. PubMed
Shortreed S, Handcock M, Hoff P. Positional estimation within the latent space model for networks. Methodology. 2006;2(1):24-33.
Meila M, Shortreed S, Liang X. Regularized spectral learning. Proceedings of the Conference in Artificial Intelligence and Statistics. Edited by Robert Cowell and Zoubin Ghahramani. 2005.
To view more publications, please see Dr. Shortreed's CV.