Joyce Niland

Joyce Niland, Ph.D., holds the Estelle & Edward Alexander Chair in Information Sciences and is Professor & Chair of the Department of Diabetes & Cancer Discovery Science at City of Hope. She also maintains a joint appointment as Clinical Professor of Preventive Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. Her interdisciplinary lab integrates biomedical informatics, computational statistics, and clinical research to advance diabetes and cancer studies.

• Education: Ph.D. in Biometry (1984), M.S. in Biometry (1979), M.S. in Physical Therapy (1978) from University of Southern California; B.A. in Human Biology from Stanford (1975)

Her research focuses on statistical methodology for longitudinal studies, clinical trials design in oncology, and secondary use of clinical data via natural language processing (NLP). Notable projects include NLP query portability across institutions and optical character recognition tools for clinical data abstraction. She has led the development of data repositories and decision support systems critical to City of Hope’s cancer and diabetes research infrastructure.

Recent publications highlight her work in breast cancer recurrence prediction, ovarian cancer treatment, and islet transplantation for diabetes. The Niland Lab collaborates with researchers like Joo Y. Song (lymphoma genetics) and John Yim (breast surgery outcomes), while advancing methods for mining unstructured clinical data.

• Memberships: American Medical Informatics Association, International Statistical Institute, American Statistical Association, Society for Clinical Trials

Her lab team includes staff scientists like Rebecca Ottesen and statistical programmers Julie Kilburn, focusing on clinical data repositories, biostatistical modeling, and informatics infrastructure for biomedical discovery.