Dr. Capanu's current research interests are in the development of hierarchical models for epidemiologic studies to estimate the relative risk of rare genetic variants. Such data are usually very sparse, leading to unreliable conventional estimates, and Dr. Capanu is exploring the use of pseudo-likelihood and Bayesian methods to overcome these difficulties.
Dr. Capanu is involved in the statistical analysis of the WECARE (Women's Environment Cancer and Radiation Exposure) study. In collaboration with Dr. Bernstein, Dr. Capanu is examining the associations between known risk factors for breast cancer, such as family or reproductive history, and risk of developing second primary breast cancer. She is also interested in investigating the joint association of ATM gene carrier status, radiation exposure and risk of bilateral breast cancer.
Dr. Capanu's clinical collaborations are with the Gastrointestinal Oncology Service. She has been working with investigators of this group on the design and analysis of prospective and retrospective studies.
Selected Bibliography
Booth, J., Capanu, M., Heigenhauser, L. (2005) Exact conditional p-value calculation for the quasi-symmetry model, Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, Vol. 14, No. 3, September 2005 pp.716-725
Capanu, M., Jones, G. A., Randles, R. H. (2006) Testing for Preference using a Sum of Wilcoxon Signed Rank Statistics Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, Nov 15 51(2):793-796
Capanu, M., Presnell, B. (2007) Misspecification Tests for Binomial and Beta-Binomial Models, Statistics in Medicine, 27(14):2536-2554
Largent, J. A., Capanu, M., Bernstein, L., Langholz, B., Mellemkjær, L., Malone, K. E., Begg, C. B., Haile, R. W., Lynch, C. F., Anton-Culver, H., Wolitzer, A., Bernstein, J. L. (2007) Reproductive history and risk of second primary breast cancer: the WECARE Study, Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, 16(5): 906-911
Capanu, M., Orlow, I., Berwick, M., Hummer, A. J., Thomas, D. C., Begg, C. B. (2008) The Use of Hierarchical Models for Estimating Relative Risks of Individual Genetic Variants: An Application to a Study of Melanoma, Statistics in Medicine, 27(11):1973-1992
