Faculty

Dr Dipankar Bandyopadhyay is a Professor in the Department of Biostatistics in the newly formed School of Public Health at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). A career biostatistician and health data scientist, he is also the Senior Advisor of Data and Cancer Modeling at VCU’s Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center. He obtained his Masters in Statistics from the University of Calcutta, followed by a 2nd Masters (also in Statistics), and a PhD from the University of Georgia (UGA), Athens, Georgia. While attending UGA, he obtained a Dissertation Completion Fellowship.

Dr Bandyopadhyay has authored/co-authored 180+ publications (h-index = 37), with primary research interests in spatial and spatio-temporal modelling, time-to-event analysis, correlated and longitudinal data, nonparametric methods, non-Gaussian regression, tensor/matrix-variate regression, precision medicine, and also their applications to problems in epidemiology and behavioural studies. He usually searches for a pragmatic solution to the biostatistical modelling problem, which can either follow the Bayesian paradigm, or rely on frequentism. Recently, he has been focusing more on big-data computing, machine/deep learning tools, and modelling electronic health records and observational data generated under a practice-based setting. His major clinical interest is in oral and craniofacial epidemiology, in particular, investigating periodontal health and caries progression via studies mostly funded by the United States National Institutes of Health. He also remains engaged in long-standing collaborations on cancer (both basic science and epidemiology), organ transplantation (in particular, kidney), cardiovascular disease, substance abuse and alcohol addiction, medical imaging, and neurological disorders. His national and international reputation is evidenced in the receipt of various awards and honours, such as the CDC/ATSDR Statistical Science Award (2011), Outstanding Young Researcher Award from the International Indian Statistical Association (2015), the Gertrude M. Cox award by the Washington Statistical Society (2020), the Outstanding Statistical Applications award from the American Statistical Association (ASA, 2021), and the inaugural Dayanand Naik award from the ASA, VA-Chapter (2021).

Throughout his career, Dr Bandyopadhyay has continued to remain engaged in rendering exemplary service to the profession of public health, which includes high-energy involvement with the ASA, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the International Biometric Society. In addition to being an elected Fellow of the ASA (2018), and elected member of the International Statistical Institute (2020), he has served as the Program Chair of the Biometrics Section in the 2016 Joint Statistical Meetings, as the Chair of ASA’s E.C. Bryant Scholarship Committee on survey statistics (2019-2022), and more recently, as the Vice-Chair of the ASA Committee of Representatives to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2024-2025). From 2016 to 2021, he served as the Director of the Biostatistics Shared Resources at the VCU’s Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center. Currently, he serves as the Director of Data Analytics, Kidney and Transplant Epidemiology Core, within the Division of Nephrology at VCU, and as Senior Advisor, Data and Cancer Modeling at Massey.

Dr Bandyopadhyay and his research group have made some unique and path-breaking contributions to advancing public health dentistry. In this context, his work has focused extensively on evaluating the periodontal status of a Type-2 diabetic Gullah-speaking population, residing in the South Carolina sea-islands. In addition to being a well-sought-after co-investigator (as reflected in his range of peer-reviewed clinical publications), he continues to lead a federally-funded research group for several years with multiple R01 and R03/R21 grants from the National Institutes of Health. Some of his research projects as Principal Investigator include the following:

• Maiden attempts to address epidemiologically stubborn issues of non-stationarity, non-normality, and non-random missingness, within a unified framework in periodontal disease progression
• A 2-stage pragmatic modeling proposal to quantify dental caries progression
• Proposing correction measures in presence of misclassification under spatial referencing in dental caries
• A Bayesian nonparametric formulation for spatial ordinal periodontal outcomes
• A graphical model for non-Gaussian matrix-variate periodontal data
• Individualised recall interval assessments in periodontal disease, from electronic health records, via Bayesian nonparametric disease dynamics, and the g-computation techniques
• Sample size/power considerations for the first sequential, multiple assessment, randomised trial (SMART) for assessing effectiveness if treatment sequences in non-surgical periodontitis. SMARTs are very popular in psychiatry.

Dr Bandyopadhyay continues to publish in top-tier statistical/biostatistical journals, such as the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Biometrics, and The Annals of Applied Statistics. Some of his significant publications are:

• Bandyopadhyay D., Marlow N., Fernandes J.K., Leite R. (2010). Periodontal disease progression and glycemic control among Gullah African-Americans with Type-2 diabetes, Journal of Clinical Periodontology, 37(6), 501-509.
• Bandyopadhyay D., Sinha D., Lipsitz S., Letourneau E. (2010). Changing approaches of prosecutors towards juvenile repeated sex-offenders: a Bayesian evaluation, The Annals of Applied Statistics, 4(2), 805-829
• Reich B.J., Bandyopadhyay D. and Bondell H. (2013). A nonparametric spatial model for periodontal data with non-random missingness, Journal of the American Statistical Association - Applications & Case Studies, 108(503), 820-831
• Jin I-H, Yuan Y. and Bandyopadhyay D. (2016). A Bayesian hierarchical spatial model for dental caries assessment using non-Gaussian Markov random fields, The Annals of Applied Statistics, 10(2), 884-905
• *Guan Q., Reich B.J., Laber E. and Bandyopadhyay D. (2020). Bayesian nonparametric policy search with applications to periodontal recall intervals, Journal of the American Statistical Association - Applications & Case Studies, 105(531), 1066-1078
• Azevedo D.R.M., Prates M.O. and Bandyopadhyay D. (2023). Alleviating spatial confounding in frailty models, Biostatistics, 24(4), 945-961
• Lee C.Y., Wong K.Y., Lam K.F. and Bandyopadhyay D. (2023). A semiparametric joint model for cluster size and subunit-specific interval-censored outcomes, Biometrics, 79(3), 2010-2022
• Lee I., Mai Q., Sinha D., Zhang X., and Bandyopadhyay D. (2023). Bayesian regression analysis of skewed tensor responses, Biometrics, 79(3), 1814-1825
• Lu X., Wang Y., Bandyopadhyay D., Bakoyannis G. (2023). Sieve estimation of a class of partially linear transformation models with interval-censored competing risks data, Statistica Sinica, 33, 685-704

For a complete list, please visit here.

Dr Bandyopadhyay holds graduate education in the highest esteem; he has taught a wide variety of graduate-level courses which spans both public health and medicine to prepare the next generation of successful statisticians, biostatisticians, and epidemiologists, and served as mentors to multiple Masters/PhD students.

The full-semester courses he has taught so far (for Master’s and PhD students) include:

• Categorical Data Analysis and Generalised Linear Models
• Statistical Learning and Data Mining
• Biostatistics Research Seminar
• Linear Models
• Survival Analysis
• Advanced Bayesian Biostatistics
• Analysis of Biomedical Data
• Advanced Spatial Biostatistics
• Introductory Spatial Biostatistics
• Introductory Bayesian Biostatistics
• Stochastic Processes in Biology and Medicine
• Nonparametric Methods in Biology and Medicine