Current Research Interests:

Dr. Heller's current research interests include the analysis of phase II clinical trial data and the analysis of survival data. For the analysis of a phase II study, he has developed a test statistic that adjusts for patient risk and improves the accuracy of the test for treatment efficacy relative to conventional tests. In survival analysis, Dr. Heller developed an alternative to the proportional hazards model that uses the ranks of the survival times and produces robust estimates within the structure of the accelerated failure time model. Dr. Heller is involved in the design and analysis of laboratory and clinical studies emanating from the Departments of Medicine, Pediatrics, and Urology. In addition, he is the Principal Investigator for the Biostatistics Core in NIH program projects in Bone Marrow Transplantation, Gene Therapy, and the Prostate SPORE.

Selected Bibliography:

1. Heller G. Incorporating follow-up time in M-estimation for survival data. Lifetime Data Analysis 2004; 10:51-64.

2. Heller G, Venkatraman ES. A nonparametric test to compare survival distributions with covariate adjustment. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B 2004; 66: 719-733.

3. Gonen M, Heller G. Concordance probability and discriminatory power in proportional hazards regression. Biometrika 2005; 92: 965-970.

4. Heller G. Power calculations for preclinical studies using a K-sample rank test and the Lehmann alternative hypothesis. Statistics in Medicine 2006; 25: 2543-2553.

5. Heller G. Smoothed Rank Regression with Censored Data. Journal of the American Statistical Association 2006; (in press).