Dr. Sharina Person is Professor and Dr. Marcellette G. Williams Senior Scholar at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. There she serves as Vice Chair of the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences. Prior to joining UMass Chan, she was on the faculty of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. There, she served as the Director of the NHLBI-funded CARDIA Coordinating Center as well as the Director of the Methodology Units of both the Center for Outcomes Effectiveness Research and Education (COERE) and the Center for Education and Research Therapeutics (CERTs) of Musculoskeletal Disorders. She also directed her Division’s statistical, data management, and information systems infrastructure.
A Ph.D. trained Biostatistician with over 25 years of experience, she currently serves as Associate Director and a senior faculty member in the Quantitative Methods Core, which provides consultative services to UMass Chan investigators in the areas of study design, sample size, power calculations, statistical analysis plans, statistical programming, data entry and management, and project coordination. Her research interests include randomized controlled trials, coordinating center operations and methods, quality assurance, and statistical modeling, particularly in large-scale collaborative research studies. Additionally, she has extensive experience with cluster randomization and hierarchical models, mixed-model methodology, and longitudinal studies.
A long-term educator, she taught in Population Health Research Ph.D. Program, led a course for the UMMS Health Science Preparation Program and has helped train new research investigators in Parana, Brazil. Nationally, she serves on numerous Data Safety and Observational Study Monitoring Boards, and External Advisory Boards, is a longtime consultant to the Jackson Heart Study, and is an active grant reviewer for NHLBI, NCI, and the Center for Scientific Review. She is also a co-developer and the director of the Diversity Engagement Survey, a reliable and valid instrument for assessment, evaluation, and external benchmarking of institutional engagement and inclusion, which has been implemented nationally and internationally.