Faculty Bio

Overview

Faculty

Administration

Marike Vuga, Ph.D.

Research Assistant Professor
Department of Epidemiology
University of Pittsburgh
130 DeSoto Street, 127 Parran Hall
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Voice: 412-624-4219
Fax: 412-624-3775
E-mail: vugam@edc.pitt.edu


Research Interests

• Biostatistical Methods Application in Public Health, Women’s Health, Cancer and Neurophysiology Research
• Improving Methodologies for Health Science Research and Clinical Assessments

Dr. Vuga’s research interests focus on improving statistical methods for employing in the fields of epidemiology, neurophysiology, clinical and biomedical research. She is an expert in longitudinal analysis and missing data methods. Her current work is on women’s health, which is in agreement with her long standing interest in women’s health documented since her master thesis on breast cancer (“Sequential therapy in metastatic breast cancer: Survival analysis with time dependent covariates”).

Education & Training

• University of Technology, Graz, Austria – M.S. Engineering Mathematics, 1995
• University of Technology, Vienna, Austria – Ph.D. Engineering Mathematics, 2001
• University of Pittsburgh – M.S. Biostatistics, 2005

Honors and Awards

• Delta Omega: Honor Society in Public Health - Omicron Chapter, Elected 2006.
• 2006 Thesis Award: The Best Master Thesis of the year 2005 in the Department of Biostatistics, Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh.
• 2007 Annual Honor Convocation: Honored for Outstanding Academic Achievements, University of Pittsburgh

Current Projects

    Lead Statistician

• 2006-2009
Study of Women's Health Across the Nation III (SWAN), Coordinating Center, NIA

Selected Publications

Vuga M., Fox N.A., Cohn J.F., Kovacs M., George C. 2008. Long-term stability of electroencephalographic asymmetry and power in 3 to 9 year-old children. Int. J. Psychophys., 67, 70-77.

Kapoor A., Chow S., Bhargava R., Surti U., Rosenzweig M., Vuga M., Brufsky A. 2007. (Abstract) Topoisomerase II-alpha (TOP2A) gene co-amplification does not predict response to therapy and survival in Her-2 neu positive metastatic breast cancer. J. Clin. Oncol., 2007 ASCO Annual Meeting Proceedings Part I., 25, 18S:21108.

Vuga M., Fox N.A., Cohn J.F., George C., Levenstein R.M., Kovacs M. 2006. Long-term stability of electroencephalographic asymmetry in adults with history of depression, Int. J. Psychophys., 59, 107-115.

Galles S., Essl M., Santucci A., Cohn J.F., Fox N.A. 2004. (Abstract) Long-term stability of heart period and heart rate variability in adults with history of depression. Psychophysiology 41, Supplement 1, 31.

Essl M., Rappelsberger P. 1999. EEG coherence as a function of the recording technique: Is Laplacian a useful approach? Med. Biol. Eng. Comput. 37, Supplement 2, Part I, 478-479.

Essl M., Rappelsberger P. 1998. EEG coherence and reference signals: experimental results and mathematical explanations. Med. Biol. Eng. Comput., 36, 399-406.

Essl M. 1998. Simulation of EEG signals with auto-regressive models. In Rattay, F. (Ed.) Proceedings TU-BioMed Symposium 1998, Brain Modelling, ARGESIM Report No. 10, 1998, 15-18.

Essl M., Rappelsberger P. 1998. EEG coherence and the reference problem: Simulation of signals with autoregressive models. In Boenick U., M. Schaldach (Eds.), Biomedizinische Technik, Band 43, Ergänzungsband 2, 37-39.

Essl M., Rappelsberger P. 1997. Dependence of coherence using different recording techniques. In: Quantitative and Topological EEG and MEG Analysis, Witte H., Zwiener U., Schack B., Doering A. (Eds.), Druckhaus Mayer Verlag, Jena, 440-442.