Nicole Butera

Nicole Butera joined the GWU Biostatistics Center in August 2019 as a statistician for the Glycemic Reduction Approaches in Diabetes (GRADE) study, a clinical trial comparing the effectiveness of different glucose-lowering drugs among individuals diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. In this role, she contributes to assuring the quality of study data, identifying statistical methods to address the unique features of the study data, and planning and conducting statistical analyses to address the scientific aims of the study. She is also working as a co-principal investigator of the Statistical Analysis Center for the REACT Study, a phase II clinical trial to investigate the efficacy and safety of microbiome therapy to treat multi-drug resistant organism colonization among patients admitted to long-term care facilities, providing leadership in designing the trial and planning the statistical analyses for the study. She has statistical expertise related to methods to accommodate “messy” data, such as missing data and measurement error, use of off-protocol treatments in clinical trials, and complex survey data. In particular, she is interested in applying her statistical expertise to research aimed at improving public health.

Prior to joining the Biostatistics Center, Dr. Butera received her PhD in Biostatistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her dissertation research focused on developing a doubly robust method for regression analysis using multilevel data (i.e., clustered data) when there are missing data on the outcome variable, as well as developing statistical methods to model longitudinal change in a biomarker (e.g., blood pressure) when a subset of the sample has initiated treatment (e.g., antihypertensive medication) mid-study. During her doctoral education, she also worked as a collaborative statistician on a multi-site, community-based cohort study, with a sample selected through a probability-based complex sampling design.

Current BSC Projects