Research Design & Methods
Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design (BERD)
BERD includes faculty and staff who offer support via a targeted intake and consultation approach.
Our mission is to support and collaborate with scholars and early-career researchers on methods used in translational research and science, from study design to data management, analytic methods, and results interpretation. To fulfill our mission, we collaborate with and complement other groups across campus to provide investigators with research methods and analytic support.
Basic Support
Initial Consultation: We provide UTSW faculty and affiliated investigators up to five hours of consultation and services sponsored by UT Southwestern’s Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Program. (This is free of charge to you.)
Activities during this initial phase include assessing investigator needs, discussing scope of work, and providing information about available support and expertise.
Longitudinal Support: Additional longitudinal, structured support is offered to KL2 Scholars, Dean’s Clinical Research Scholars, and those enrolled in CTSA Program workforce development, such as K or R grant writing workshops.
Collaboration: Our goal is to assist you toward success with your project by providing expertise, feedback, and collaborative advice. If we are not the best team to assist with your project, we will refer you to other groups on campus who may be better suited to collaborate with you.
Ready to get started with BERD support? Click the button below, complete the form, and you will hear from us soon.
If you require assistance with data analysis or data management, please also select the button below to complete the BERD Data Analysis Request Form, in addition to the initial intake form.
BERD Data Analysis Request Form
Questions about BERD services? ResearchMethods@UTSouthwestern.edu BERD.
Specialized Support
This group includes faculty with expertise in areas such as health services research, implementation science, community-engaged research, and health policy research, offering support for scholars and early-career researchers in developing feasible, inclusive, and strategic proposals. Below are examples of project activities for which consultation is available.
- Defining hypotheses and endpoints
- Developing study protocols
- Assisting with grant applications
- Guiding grant application design
- Calculating sample sizes
- Converting raw data into analytic sets
- Conducting analysis and preparing reports
- Interpreting results
- Assisting with dissemination products
- Project design considerations
- Setting up study databases
Through these activities, our goal is to cultivate collaborative relationships that can support successful funding, research, and dissemination.
Support Guidelines
Your BERD request begins with completing an intake form; it helps our team provide you with the best support. A new form is required for each project.
During consultations, medical students, residents, and fellows must be accompanied by a faculty mentor who is either the project’s Principal Investigator (PI) or is authorized to speak on behalf of the PI.
Our services are sponsored by the UTSW CTSA Program. In most cases, we will be able to address your request within the five hours of consultation services covered by CTSA. If additional time beyond this allotment is necessary, this will be explained, including an estimate of the cost to extend work on the project.
Part of the intake process is determining if a data analyst is required for your projects and when they will be available assist you. If working with an analyst, please budget up to two weeks for work to begin.
Often, initial analyses lead to unexpected findings and subsequent ideas. Anticipating this, requests for data analysis should be submitted as early as possible to allow time for the work to be completed to your satisfaction by your deadline. Because our analysts are juggling other projects, requests with only a few weeks until a deadline are unlikely to be accommodated.
Please note that it is the PI’s responsibility to adhere to Good Clinical Practice (GCP) guidelines and Institutional Review Board (IRB) rules and regulations.
Grant Proposals
Lead Time: here is no rule for the time required for preparing a statistical analysis plan. Generally, two to three months to assist with grant preparation can be expected. We anticipate that in most cases, grant preparation activities will require more than five hours and involve cost assessments for work extending beyond this allotment.
Final Review: Research Design & Methods analysts assisting with grant preparation should review the final version of the analysis plan prior to reviews of the science and budget.
Grant Effort: Research works best when analysts who write the initial analysis plan also conduct data analyses. An effective way to foster a collaborative research partnership is to include your analyst in your application. This approach demonstrates the soundness of the statistical plan and supports the likelihood of funding.
Manuscript Assistance
Authorship: We are enthusiastic about assisting investigators with manuscript preparation and dissemination. We follow guidance from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, which defines three criteria for authorship:
- Significant contribution to the conception, design, execution, and/or analysis and interpretation of data
- Participation in drafting, reviewing, and/or revising the manuscript for intellectual content
- Approval of the manuscript to be published
Research Design & Methods team members often contribute in ways that confer authorship. Please discuss authorship as early as possible with your BERD team.
Always cite the CTSA Grant as follows:
Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under award Number UL1 TR003163. Content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH (National Institutes of Health). The authors thank the UT Southwestern Research Design & Methods team for statistical and data analysis expertise.
Affiliated Faculty
Director Research Design & Methods
Dr. Liao is a Professor of Internal Medicine and in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. School of Public Health at UT Southwestern Medical Center. Dr. Liao has extensive experience and expertise in health policy and population health interventions, with emphasis on quantitative program evaluation and implementation of behaviorally designed care delivery interventions.
Expertise: Health policy, health care payment, population health, value-based care, and behavioral economics
BERD
Dr. Ahn is a Professor in the O’Donnell School of Public Health and Director of Biostatistics Shared Resources at the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center. Previously, he served as Director of Biostatistics for the BERD Core. Dr. Ahn has served as biostatistics leader for research projects and clinical trials and has over 520 peer-reviewed publications. He has extensive experience in the design and analysis of preclinical, clinical, epidemiologic, and population studies. Additionally, he has authored numerous methodological papers on the design and analysis of correlated data as well as two books: Sample Size Calculations for Clustered and Longitudinal Outcomes in Clinical Research and Design and Analysis of Pragmatic Trials.
Expertise: Design and analysis of clinical trials, causal inference, and observational analysis
Dr. Lee is an Associate Professor in the O’Donnell School of Public Health. She also serves as Chair of the Population Science Protocol Review and Monitoring Committee (PRMC) at Simmons Cancer Center. Dr. Lee’s research focus centers around developing and applying innovative statistical methods to solve challenges and issues found in various research areas.
Expertise: Statistical analysis and design for disease prevention/behavioral intervention trials, multilevel data/longitudinal data analysis, biomarker data analysis, and lifestyle behavioral data analysis
Dr. Zhang is a Professor in the O’Donnell School of Public Health and Director of the UTSW CTSA Program BERD (Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design) initiative. He also serves as an expert of experimental design on the National Cancer Institute Central Institutional Review Board (Adult CIRB – Early Phase Emphasis). His research interests include Bayesian hierarchical modeling and clinical trial design. He has co-authored two books: Sample Size Calculations for Clustered and Longitudinal Outcomes in Clinical Research and Design and Analysis of Pragmatic Trials. As a Principal Investigator, Dr. Zhang has received funding from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support his research.
Expertise: Design and analysis of clinical trials, observational studies, large national database analysis, and Bayesian hierarchical models
Specialized Support - BERD Collaborating Faculty
Dr. Hong is an Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine and in the O’Donnell School of Public Health and oversees the Delivery Redesign for Innovation, Value, and Equity (DRIVE) and Clinical Research, Evaluation, and Data Office (CREDO) initiatives as part of his role as Director, Research & Scholarship, in the Division of General Internal Medicine. His research interests include understanding how patients and clinicians interact within the health care system.
Expertise: Health services, insurance claims, health records, interrupted time series, care delivery, and quality of care
Dr. Jackson is a Professor of Internal Medicine and in the O’Donnell School of Public Health. A health care epidemiologist and implementation scientist with a background in health administration, he joined UT Southwestern in 2023 as Director of the Advancing Implementation & Improvement Science Program in the O’Donnell School of Public Health. The goal is to develop a system to identify potentially successful projects using implementation and improvement science, which uses rigorous, data-driven research to expand programs and improve a community’s health.
Expertise: Implementation science and improvement science
Dr. Kitzman is an Associate Professor in the O’Donnell School of Public Health and Director of the Office of Community Health and Research Engagement. Her expertise is in randomized and pragmatic studies at the community or clinic level to improve health outcomes in those experiencing poverty and ethnic minority groups. She also has proficiency in patient reported outcomes, electronic health record data, community-based study implementation, and qualitative, quantitative, and biospecimen measurements.
Expertise: Patient and community-engaged translational and clinical research and recruitment in lower income and underrepresented in biomedical research populations
Dr. Xie is a Professor in the O’Donnell School of Public Health and the Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics, serves as Associate Dean of Data Science, and holds the Raymond D. and Patsy R. Nasher Distinguished Chair in Cancer Research, in Honor of Eugene P. Frenkel, M.D. She is the founding Director of the Quantitative Biomedical Research Center, the Data Science for Precision Health Initiative, and the Pediatric Cancer Data Core at UT Southwestern. She has served as a regular member of the NIH Biodata Management and Analysis Study Section and is an adviser to the journal Lancet Digital Health. With training in statistics, medicine, and epidemiology, she has a comprehensive understanding of developing and validating quantitative methods for precision health applications.
Expertise: Machine learning and artificial intelligence, predictive modeling, and biomarker discovery
Dr. Yang is an Assistant Professor in the O’Donnell School of Public Health and Director of the Biostatistics and Data Science Core, where he leads a team to provide informatics, analytics, and technological support to UTSW investigators and beyond. His research focuses on developing methods, platforms, and infrastructure for the integration and analysis of multimodal health care and biomedical data to address clinically important questions. Dr. Yang has extensive experience working with electronic health records, claims, medical notes, and imaging and molecular profiling data. Outcomes from his research include new clinical insights from these real-world data, assessments of health and health care disparities, and data commons platforms for various disease domains.
Expertise: Data science, health informatics, machine learning, and natural language processing