Frank Harrell, PhD, is a Professor of Biostatistics at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. His areas of interest are predictive modeling and model validation, missing data, diagnostic and prognostic research, health services research, cohort studies, clinical trials, cardiovascular disease, reproducible research, and Bayesian methods.
As reflected in his almost 300 peer-reviewed publications (5 with more than 1000 citations), Dr. Harrell has devoted his career to the study of patient outcomes in general and specifically to the development of accurate prognostic and diagnostic models and models for many other patient responses. Much of Dr. Harrell's work has been applied to health services and outcomes research, technology evaluation, observational databases, and clinical trials.
He has researched methods to estimate how continuous predictors relate to outcomes without assuming linearity, showing the advantages of piecewise cubic polynomials or spline functions. All of this work has taken into account that a risk model's likely performance on a new subject sample should be the touchstone. He has extended Efron's bootstrap estimator of the "optimism" in a model's predictive accuracy to validate more complex survival and risk models.
Dr. Harrell's book Regression Modeling Strategies with Applications to Linear Models, Logistic and Ordinal Regression, and Survival Analysis (2nd Edition 2015, Springer-Verlag) contains theory, examples, and detailed case studies demonstrating the use of many modern statistical modeling tools.
He received his PhD in Biostatistics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and his BS, in math from the University of Alabama, Huntsville.