James O’Malley, PhD

A statistics virtuoso, James O’Malley uses many tools—including some he’s developed himself—to evaluate health policy and health services research and determine the statistical methods that can be used to help improve patient care. He is a professor of biostatistics at The Dartmouth Institute and the Department of Biomedical Data Science at the Geisel School of Medicine. 

His methodological interests encompass statistical inference for social networks, comparative effectiveness research including causal inference for both randomized and observational studies, Bayesian statistics, and multivariate hierarchical models. His subject matter research interests include the relationship between health and social networks, evaluation/estimation of variations in health quality and outcomes, vascular surgery, cardiology, shared decision making and risk communication with patients, and evaluation of medical devices. Specific research projects are typically motivated by problems encountered in his collaborative work with physicians, sociologists, health economists, health services researchers, epidemiologists and others.

O’Malley was chair of the Health Policy Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association (ASA) in 2008 and co-chair of the 2011 International Conference on Health Policy Statistics. He is associate editor for Statistics in Medicine and was previously an associate editor at Health Services and Outcomes Research Methodology. In 2011, he received the Mid-Career Excellence award from the Health Policy Section of the ASA and in 2012 was elected to be a fellow of the ASA.

O'Malley received his PhD in Statistics from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand in 1999, and later that year was awarded the L.J. Cote award for excellence in Applied Statistics from Purdue University.

View CV