Dan Gillen

Chancellor’s Professor and Chair Dan Gillen leads the Department of Statistics within the Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on designing robust statistical methodologies for clinical trials, particularly in Alzheimer’s disease prevention, survival analysis under censoring violations, and spatial epidemiology of health disparities.

Key research areas include:

• Clinical trial optimization using adaptive designs and interim testing
• Censoring-robust survival analysis for biomedical studies
• Environmental exposure analysis using case-crossover and nested designs
• Methodological innovations for unbalanced datasets and hormetic dose-response curves

His work addresses challenges in:

• Maintaining trial integrity during participant/study partner attrition
• Recruitment strategies for diverse populations
• Incentive frameworks for improving retention
• Addressing cohort effects in longitudinal studies

Developed tools like RCTdesign.org provide practical resources for clinical trial design/analysis. Ongoing collaborations span nephrology, oncology, and neurodegenerative disease research.

Recent work emphasizes:

• Evaluating aducanumab’s impact on trial participation willingness
• Assessing racial/ethnic disparities in biomarker disclosure distress
• Optimizing hyperparameter selection in machine learning applications
• Quantifying surgical hemostasis efficacy through novel metrics