— College of Public Health — Departments — Biostatistics — Faculty & Staff — Hongying (Daisy) Dai, PhD

Hongying (Daisy) Dai, PhD

Associate Dean of Research, College of Public Health
Professor, Department of Biostatistics
Professor, Department of Epidemiology
Full member, The Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center

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Phone: 402-559-6825
Fax: 402-559-7259

Hongying (Daisy) Dai, PhD is associate dean of research in the UNMC College of Public Health, where she also serves as a professor in the Department of Biostatistics. She is a full member of the Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center.

She joined UNMC in 2020 after holding faculty roles at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri and the University of Missouri at Kansas City Department of Pediatrics. She also was a full member of the University of Kansas Cancer Center.

Education

2006 PhD Statistics, University of Kentucky
2004 MS Statistics, University of Kentucky
2004 MS Mathematics, University of Kentucky
1997 BS Economics, University of International Business and Economics

Research Interests

Dr. Dai's current research focuses on developing statistical methodology and applying advanced statistical methods in public health research:

Statistical modeling and assessment for tobacco policy research and national behavioral surveys
Social media research using big data (Google Trends, Twitter data, disease surveillance)
Development of novel statistical methods for big data and high dimensional data, Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS)
Hierarchical modeling, asymptotic theory, and mixture modeling

Research Funding (Principal Investigator)

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: A Community Data-Driven Policy Analysis Framework to Promote Tobacco 21 In The United States
NIH/FDA: Effects of the FDA Compliance Inspections of Tobacco Retailers on Youth E-cigarette and Cigar Use: A National Study
Health Forward Foundation: Impacts of Kansas City Area Tobacco 21 Initiative
NU Planning Grant: “NO ENDS” – Collaborative Research towards Developing a Multifaceted Program in Prevention of Youth Vaping
COPH Innovation Fund: A Feasibility, Acceptability, and Fidelity Study of School-Based Youth Vaping Prevention Program in Rural and Urban Nebraska

Selected Publications

Dai H, Charnigo, R. A Sentiment Analysis of MERS-COV Outbreak through Twitter Social Media Monitoring. JP Journal of Biostatistics. 2018, 15 (2): 107-125
Dai H, Wu G, Wu M, Zhi D. (2016). An Optimal Bahadur-efficient Method in Detection of Sparse Signals with Applications to Pathway Analysis in Sequencing Association Studies. PLoS ONE.
Dai H, Charnigo R. (2015) Compound Hierarchical Correlated Beta Mixture with an Application to Cluster Mouse Transcription Factor DNA Binding Data. Biostatistics.
Dai H, Leeder S, Cui Y. (2014) A Modified Generalized Fisher Method for Combining Probabilities from Dependent Tests. Frontiers in Genetics. 20.
Dai H, Charnigo R, Vyhlidal C, Jones B, Bhandary M. (2013) Mixed Modeling and Sample Size Calculations for Identifying Housekeeping Genes. Statistics in Medicine. 32(18): 3115-25.

Professional Affiliations

American Statistical Association (ASA)
Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco (SRNT)
The International Biometric Society: The East North American Region (ENAR)