Elizabeth

Colantuoni

,

PhD

My collaborative research focuses on improving outcomes for critically ill patients (adults, children and neonates) whom are treated within the intensive care unit (ICU). My work on adult critically ill patients is through the Outcomes After Critical Illness and Surgery (OACIS) group at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where my focus is how different baseline characteristics and ICU treatments are associated with patient outcomes in the ICU such as delirium and mortality.  In addition, through work done by the OACIS-Mental Health team, there is growing knowledge and appreciation that survivors of critical illness carry the burden of illness for prolonged periods after ICU and hospital discharge.  Therefore, I have been working with long-term follow-up studies among these survivors assessing physical function, mental health and quality of life.  Several statistical challenges in these studies include:  how to model the intensive longitudinal data generated while the patients are in the ICU (daily or twice daily measurements) when often the exposures are time-varying, and the competing risk of mortality both in and out of the ICU which is especially challenging when the outcome of interest is not a survival event but a continuous or binary outcome. I have an R01 funded by the NIA to evaluate and develop novel statistical methods to evaluate interventions to treat delirium in critically ill adults. My work with critically ill pediatric and neonate populations has primarily occurred in collaboration with Dr. Aaron Milstone, Professor of Pediatrics at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. I serve as the lead Biostatistician for Dr. Milstone's research group. Recently we have completed a randomized trial of nasal mupirocin vs. placebo for decolonization of Staphylococcus Aureus in parents of neonates receiving care in the neonatal ICU. Mupirocin reduced transmission of Staphylococcus Aureus from parent to neonate by 50%. Further, I am a member of the BrightStar collaborative project where the goal is to reduce the number of blood cultures performed in pediatric ICU patients.
 
Additional statistical methods work related to leveraging prognostic baseline variables to improve precision for estimating the average treatment effect within randomized trials.  This is joint work with Michael Rosenblum and several others.

I serve as the co-Director of our graduate programs where I oversee both the ScM and MHS programs.

I teach Methods of Biostatistics 140.653-4, where we focus on all things "regression".