Faculty Spotlight: Ciprian Crainiceanu, PhD, MS

Ciprian Crainiceanu, PhD, MS, is a professor of Biostatistics at the Bloomberg School of Public Health working on complex, high dimensional data obtained from wearable and implantable computing and neuroimaging studies.

Ciprian has been at the Bloomberg School since 2004 and is one of the leaders of the Biostatistics Department’s Wearable & Implantable Technology (WIT) research working group.

What drew you to biostatistics and public health?

The deep connections between science and my set of skills and interests in biology and medicine. And also in making a difference and trying to understand what's going on. 

Can you describe your work?

High dimensional signals obtained from the body. For example, you can measure someone’s blood pressure or heart rate continuously; you can look into their brain images. I am interested in how these signals are associated with human health. Whether changes in these signals may predict future changes, adverse effects, or positive effects in one's life. And how we can intervene, if we can intervene, in the future.

What are your research interests? 

The areas I spend most time in are clinical brain imaging, especially MRI and CT. I also work on wearable implantable technology, especially related to accelerometers, glucometers, and heart rate monitors. So everything that comes from the human body that we can measure.

What impact do you hope your research will have? 

We all hope that our impact is deep and wide. I hope that I will achieve two important things. One is to look through hypothesis and scientific questions and see which ones can or cannot be supported by the data. And then I'm also interested in discovering new things. For example, we now work on cardiac surgery, where we look at the data that is monitored continuously while a person is in the ER or during cardiac surgery, and we look at all the signals continuously and try to understand what, if anything, we can do. What can be done to improve patients outcomes after the surgery; to make sure that their kidneys work well, that their brain works well afterwards. 

Where do you see your area of study going in the next five years?   

Wherever we take it. Whatever we and my students take it, that's where it's going. And that's probably the most fun part; there are so many directions that we can take. 

But it's going in the direction of trying to answer very important questions with data that is specifically tailored to answer those questions. We already have shown that physical activity is the best predictor of mortality, by far. We often find that what people say they do does not match what they actually do. And that's simply because the way we remember things and record things are not in the same resolution; people are subject to memory bias. These are the types of things that you can now get from the data, from wearable technology, that we were not able to get before. We finally get to measure exactly what people do in real life, and that makes a huge difference in terms of signal, in terms of what can be done in response to that.

The best thing about being at Hopkins is the people around me. It's the students. They're just amazing.

What do you enjoy most about being at Hopkins?

The best thing about being at Hopkins is the people around me. It's the students. They're just amazing. That and our staff and our faculty. This may sound cliché, but we are a family, and we try to maintain and improve that every day.

What would you say to a person considering a career in biostatistics?                        

Absolutely. Do it. You found something that it took me many, many years to realize exists.