Dr. Danyu Lin, Dennis Gillings Distinguished Professor of Biostatistics, has been awarded a competitive renewal of the prestigious Method to Extend Research in Time (MERIT) Award by the National Institutes of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), a branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

Dr. Danyu Lin

Dr. Lin's grant was originally funded by the NIH in 1992 and competitively renewed in 1997, 2001, and 2005, at which time it was converted to the MERIT Award.  MERIT awards provide long-term stable support to investigators whose research competence and productivity are distinctly superior and who are likely to continue to perform in an outstanding manner, according to the NIH. The provision of long-term stable support is expected to foster continued creativity and spare the investigators the administrative burdens associated with preparation and submission of full-length research grant applications. This may allow investigators the opportunity to take greater risks, be more adventurous in their lines of inquiry, or take the time to develop new techniques. 

The broad, long-term objectives of this research are to develop semiparametric regression models and associated inference procedures for the statistical analysis of "censored data," a form of incomplete information about the development of disease or death, commonly encountered in biomedical studies.  For the last 17 years, this NIH grant has enabled Dr. Lin to develop highly innovative statistical methods for the analysis of censored data. His methods have been published in leading statistical and genetic journals, and widely used by biomedical researchers.