Current Research Interests:

Since joining the Biostatistics department in 2006, Cami Sima has collaborated with researchers in the health outcomes, epidemiology and clinical services. Currently, her primary clinical collaborations are in the thoracic oncology, thoracic surgery and head and neck areas. She has been working with investigators from these groups on the design and analysis of prospective and retrospective studies, with a focus on evaluating treatment strategies, exploring various biomarkers, and developing prediction and risk models.

Dr. Sima's research interests are primarily motivated by her ongoing collaboration with the health-outcomes group. Population-based observational data sources (such as SEER-Medicare, State cancer registries/Medicaid linked data, or National Cancer Center Network) are rich resources to building evidence-based knowledge on the effectiveness of medications, devices and other relevant interventions. However, their utility is limited by inherent selection bias, non-measured confounders and non-ignorable missing data. Dr. Sima is interested in applying and extending causal inference methods such as instrumental variables and quasi-experimental designs to facilitate integrated analyses of observational datasets. She has been working with Drs. Schrag and Panageas in developing methods to characterize patterns of chemotherapy diffusion in US, using the SEER-Medicare linked registries.

Selected bibliography

1. Sima CS, Jarnagin WR, Fong Y, Elkin E, Fischer M, Wuest D, D'Angelica M, DeMatteo RP, Blumgart LH, Gonen M. Predicting the Risk of Peri-Operative Transfusion for Patients Undergoing Elective Hepatectomy. Annals of Surgery (in press).

2. Sima CS, Panageas KS, Heller G, Schrag D. Analytic Strategies for Characterizing Chemotherapy Diffusion with Patient-Level Population-Based Data. Applied Health Economics and Health Policy (in press).

3. Janjigian YY, McDonnell K, Kris MG, Shen R, Sima CS, Bach P, Rizvi NA, Riely GJ (2008), "Pack years of cigarette smoking as a prognostic factor in patients with stage IIIB/IV non-small lung cancer". Cancer (in press).

4. Schaubel DE, Wolfe RA, Sima CS, Merion RM. Estimating the Effect of a Time-Dependent Treatment by Levels of an Internal Time-Dependent Covariate: Application to the Contrast Between Liver Wait-List and Post-Transplant Mortality. Journal of American Statistical Association Mar 2009, Vol. 104, No. 485: 60-75.

5. Begg CB, Haile RW, Borg A, Malone KE, Concannon P, Thomas DC, Langholz B, Bernstein L, Olsen JH, Lynch CF, Anton-Culver H, Capanu M, Liang X, Hummer AJ, Sima CS, Bernstein JL., "Variation of breast cancer risk among BRCA1/2 carriers." JAMA 2008 Jan 9;299(2):194-20.