I
am professor 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.