Dr. Desai is Professor of Medicine, Professor of Biomedical Data Science, Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health; and Associate Dean of Research at Stanford. She joined Stanford in 2009 after spending 9 years on the faculty of the Department of Biostatistics at Columbia University. At Stanford she serves as the founding Director of the Quantitative Sciences Unit (QSU), a data science unit consisting of faculty and staff who practice data science to address critical biomedical questions. Now with over 30 faculty-, Ph.D.-, and Master’s-level members, the QSU serves as the foundation for the Biostatistics Shared Resource for the Stanford Cancer Institute as well as for the Biostatistics Epidemiology and Research Design (BERD) Program of the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA), which Dr. Desai also leads.
Dr. Desai recently served as PI of the Data Coordinating Center for the Apple Heart Study, a pragmatic, siteless trial that enrolled over 400,000 participants, in which the goal was to characterize performance of an app to identify atrial fibrillation in the general population. She is also PI of a Data Coordinating Center for a large multi-center trial investigating a therapy for the hospitalized pneumonia patient (ARREST Trial), and of an R01 to develop new methods for the analysis of high dimensional accelerometer data. Her methodological areas of interest include the handling of missing data, translation of trial findings to real-world target populations; and integration of real-world data, like mobile health and electronic health records data, into clinical trials.
