I am professor
and director of the graduate program in the Department
of Biostatistics at the Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
I
received pre- and post- doctoral training from the Department
of Biostatistics at the Harvard
School of Public Health under the guidance of Butch
Tsiatis (pre) and James
Robins (post). I joined Johns Hopkins in 1997 as an
assistant professor and was promoted to full professor in
2008.
My
research is focused on how to draw inferences about
treatment effects in the presence of selection bias.
Specifically, I am interested in how to report results in
randomized trials with informative missing or censored data
and in observational studies with non-random treatment
assignment. Click on the research link above for more
details.
I
recently served on the National Academy panel, which issued
the report The
Prevention and Treatment of Missing Data in Clinical
Trials.
I
am the principal statistician of the METRC
consortium, which is funded by the Department of
Defense to conduct multi-center clinical research relevant
to the treatment and outcomes of orthopaedic trauma
sustained in the military. I have also served as the lead
statistician on a number of large evaluation studies
including the National Study of the Costs and Outcomes of
Trauma (NSCOT), Guided
Care for Chronically Ill Older Adults and Healthy
Steps for Young Children. Click on the collaborations
link above for more detail.
I am
president of Saphire Consulting, Inc., which provides
expertise on the design, analysis, interpretation and
monitoring of randomized and observational studies. I can
be contacted at dscharf@saphire-biostatistics.com.
I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, although I have retained little of the classic accent. I am married to Julie Alpher Scharfstein, who was a classmate of mine at Harvard. We have three children: Kayla , Ava, and Nadia.