Jing Cheng, MD, MS, PhD
Dr. Cheng is Professor of Biostatistics within the UCSF Division of Oral Epidemiology & Dental Public Health and Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and a faculty member in the UCSF Center to Address Disparities in Oral Health (CAN DO), Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science (TCORS), Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Clinical & Transnational Science Institute (CTSI). Dr. Cheng is a well-known biostatistician and 2019 Chair-Elected of the American Statistical Association Section on Statistics in Epidemiology. Dr. Cheng is Associate Editor and on editorial board of several scientific journals, and has been invited to provide scientific review for 30 scientific journals and NIH/NIDCR special review panels.
Dr. Cheng earned her medical degree in China, M.S. in nutrition at Cornell University in 2002, and Ph.D. in biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 2006. Before joining UCSF School of Dentistry in 2010, Dr. Cheng was an Assistant Professor in Biostatistics at the University of Florida’s College of Medicine.
Dr. Cheng develops new statistical methods for complex problems in randomized trials and observational studies. Dr. Cheng is principal investigator (PI) on various projects, developing statistical methods to better understand the effects of a treatment or program on health outcomes in studies with challenging problems and the underlying mechanisms of the treatment via biomarkers, behaviors and social factors. Dr. Cheng's researches provide investigators evidence to understand the causal pathway/mechanism of the treatment and improve future programs by tailoring specific components of the treatment in specific populations.
Dr. Cheng also works with investigators in various fields of health sciences, including dentistry and oral diseases, biomedicine, cancer, infectious diseases, pharmacogenomics, nursing, public policy research, and tobacco control on study design, power analysis, randomization, statistical analysis, and the preparation of grant proposals and manuscripts.
Dr. Cheng's specific research interests include causal inference (instrumental variables and propensity scores) with applications in clinical trials with complex issues, e.g., noncompliance, mediation through intermediate variables (biomarkers, attitude, knowledge, behaviors etc.), missing data, and outcomes only observed in “survivors” etc., and in observational studies with measured and unmeasured confounding, methods for genetic association studies, categorical data analysis, longitudinal data analysis, survey design and analysis, and nonparametric statistics.