Michael Newton, PhD

Dr. Newton is dedicated to the Wisconsin HN SPORE application, having worked closely with Drs. Menggang Yu and Richard Chappell on the Biostatistics and Data Management Core and having collaborated actively with members of the HN SPORE team, particularly Drs. Paul Lambert and Paul Ahlquist in Project 1. He is a professor in the Departments of Statistics and of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics. Dr. Newton’s research concerns statistical inference in various problems from the biological sciences, especially the use and development of stochastic models, empirical Bayesian methods and advanced statistical computing. Examples include statistical methods for gene expression analysis, microRNA analysis and the analysis of genomic aberrations. He often works on interdisciplinary projects, especially in genomics and cancer biology, and in this effort he has been fortunate to collaborate regularly on projects in cancer virology. He co-directs the Cancer Genetics Program at the UWCCC and leads the Stochastic Modeling Lab within the newly established Center for Predictive Computational Phenotyping, one of the NIH Centers of Excellence in Big Data Computing. Dr. Newton’s experience with genomic data analysis is extensive (e.g., a series of applied projects on cancers with viral etiology and methods papers on gene set enrichment analysis) and thus qualifies him to be co-director of the Biostatistics Core of the Wisconsin HN SPORE.