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 holds the Peggy Y. Thomson Professorship in the Evaluative Clinical Sciences, is Professor of The Dartmouth Institute of Health Policy and Clinical Practice and of Biomedical Data Science at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, and is an Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Mathematics at Dartmouth College.

His methodological interests encompass statistical inference for social networks, comparative effectiveness research including causal inference for both randomized and observational studies, multivariate hierarchical models, and Bayesian statistics. His subject matter research interests include the relationship between social networks and health; modeling variations in health care utilization, quality, and outcomes; comparison of different approaches in vascular surgery and cardiology, evaluating strategies for shared decision-making and risk communication with patients, and developing novel study designs to evaluate 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. He has published more than 250 peer-reviewed research papers and given numerous invited talks at conferences and when visiting other universities, colleges, or institutions.

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 for Observational Studies. At Dartmouth, he was Director of the Program in Quantitative Biomedical Sciences (QBS) from 2018 - 2020 and currently is Co-Director of the Ph.D. Program in Health Policy and Clinical Practice.

In 2011, he received the Mid-Career Excellence award from the Health Policy Section of the ASA, in 2012 was elected to be a fellow of the ASA, and in 2019 received the International Society of Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) Health Economics and Outcomes Research Excellence in Methodology Award.

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.

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