Boston University School of Public Health

Laura Forsberg White, PhD, joined the Department of Biostatistics in 2006 after completing her PhD in Biostatistics at Harvard University.   She is interested in statistical methods for public health surveillance systems, including spatial statistics and time series, as well as the development of novel methodologies for the detection of disease outbreaks.  Methods for these systems must have the capability to detect aberrant events rapidly, making timeliness a key issue and challenge.  Dr. White’s research interests also include monitoring and rapidly estimating key parameters that quantify the spread of an infectious disease epidemic, for instance Avian Influenza, a bioterrorist event or new, emerging disease.  She is interested in interfacing traditional epidemiological methods for characterizing and predicting infectious disease outbreaks and new statistical techniques to estimate and quantify these outbreaks.  Additionally she serves as a statistical consultant to the BUMC Emergency Medicine Department and continues to collaborate with researchers in Harvard’s School of Public Health.  At BUSPH, she teaches Introduction to Biostatistics (BS701). 

1. Chartrand , MM, Frank, DA, White, LF, Shope TR. The impact of parents’ wartime deployment on the behavior of young children in military families. Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, (2008) in press.

2. LF White and M Pagano. A likelihood based method for real time estimation of the serial interval and reproductive number of an epidemic. Statistics in Medicine, 2008; 27 (16) 2999-3016.

3.   LF White and M Pagano. Transmissibility of the Influenza Virus in the 1918 Pandemic. PLoS ONE, 2008; 3(1): e1498. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001498.

4.   K Freeman, JA Feldman, P Mitchell, J Donovan, KS Dyer, L Eliseo, LF White, ES Temin. Effects of Presentation and electrocardiogram on time-to-treatment of hyperkalemia. Academic Emergency Medicine, 2008 Mar;15(3):239-49.

5.  A Ozonoff, C Jeffery, J Manjourides, L Forsberg White, M Pagano. Effect of spatial resolution on cluster detection: a simulation study.  International Journal of Health Geographics, 2007, 6:52.

6. A Ozonoff, M Bonetti, L Forsberg, M Pagano.  Revised power comparisons for disease clustering tests.  Computational Statistics and Data Analysis. 2005; 48 (4) 679-684.

7.  A Ozonoff , L Forsberg, M Bonetti, M Pagano.  A bivariate method for spatio-temporal surveillance. MMWR 2004; 53 (Suppl):61-66.