Nikki Freeman, PhD, assistant professor of biostatistics & bioinformatics, received a PhD in biostatistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2023. She earned a Master of Arts in statistics from Washington University in St. Louis in 2022 and a Master of Arts in Economics from Duke University in 2009. She received a Bachelor of Science degree in economics from Texa A&M University in 2007.
Why did you choose to join the faculty in the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics?
Laine Thomas.
Where were you working previously? What was your role there?
Before coming to Duke, I was a post-doc in the UNC Department of Surgery. Earlier in my career, I was a research associate at RTI International and an adjunct instructor in math and statistics at Saint Louis University,
What is your approach to mentorship/teaching?
I believe in leadership from every seat. I want my students to own their work and feel empowered to make the big (and little) decisions about the science that statisticians are entrusted to make. Students are so creative, and I try to stay out of the way and encourage that creativity.
What will you be teaching/what types of learners will you be working with?
I'm not currently teaching, but I supervise a doctoral student at UNC and mentor a post-doc at McGill.
What are your research interests?
Dynamic treatment regimes, clinical trials including adaptive trials and sequential multiple assignment randomized trials (SMARTs), machine learning, and Bayesian machine learning
Are there any major research grants you have been a part of or are currently working on?
When I was at RTI International, I worked on CMS-funded projects, mostly related to the evaluation of new models for health care delivery and payment. At UNC, I worked on a large, multi-country Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded project that prospectively collected intrapartum data in low-resource settings. I currently support an American Diabetes Foundation-funded SMART trial that aims to learn the best treatment sequence for diabetes distress in adults with type 1 diabetes and am a faculty biostatistician for the RECOVER-AUTONOMIC trial.