Peter Imrey Research Program

Peter Imrey, PhD

Staff
(Joint appointment in Mellen Center/NI)
Email: [email protected]
Location: Cleveland Clinic Main Campus

Research

The Peter Imrey research program focuses on collaborative health research and medical education, leading in study design and data analysis on a variety of projects. 

Biography

Dr. Imrey was unusually broadly and deeply trained in mathematical statistics, biostatistics, and epidemiology at Columbia University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (PhD, 1972), with deepest expertise in analysis of categorical data, generalized linear models, and epidemiological methods, and he has authoritative methodological publications in these statistical areas. But his recent and current activities in a long career have strongly emphasized collaborative health research and medical education. He leads study design and data analysis efforts for the NIH-funded Pragmatic Cyclical Lower Extremity Exercise for Parkinson's Disease (CYCLE II) and Bridge-Enhanced ACL Restoration - Multicenter Orthopaedic Outcomes Network (BEAR-MOON) Trials, the Arthritis Foundation funded Corticosteroid Meniscectomy Randomized Trial (COMET), and for NIH-funded cohort studies of rotator cuff repair and total shoulder arthroplasty. He also led biostatistical efforts for a recently concluded Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research (AHRQ) grant to study antibiotic resistance and other aspects of care and outcomes of hospitalized pneumonia patients using a large national hospital-discharge database enriched with microbiological test results. Earlier, he provided biostatistical leadership for clinical trials of patient education for reducing unnecessary medical visits for minor respiratory infections, of continuous positive airway pressure for reducing speech hypernasality and for preventing atelectasis after cardiac and upper abdominal surgeries, and of immunosuppressive and stem cell therapies for multiple sclerosis, as well as for a national, multicenter cohort study of hemodialysis arteriovenous fistula maturation. Past applied work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was Professor of Medical Information Science, Statistics, Community Health, and Oral Molecular Biology before joining Cleveland Clinic in 2001, included methodological, guidelines, cross-sectional diagnostic and cohort screening publications in dentistry; diet and cancer studies in rodents; and observational epidemiologic studies of cardiac arrhythmias, nasopharyngeal cancer, and meningococcal disease.

Dr. Imrey has taught biostatistical and epidemiological research methods extensively to health science and statistics students, including developing and implementing substantial required methodology components of two small and unique research-oriented medical schools.  He is Professor of Medicine in the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine (CCLCM) and co-founded, with Michael Lauer, M.D. and Ralph O’Brien, Ph.D., CCLCM’s nine-week intensive Clinical Research Block.  He has also taught at times epidemiologic study design and data analytic methods in the Center for Educational Studies, Molecular Medicine Ph.D. Program, and Internal Medicine Residency Clinical Scholars Program (CLINSCHOP).  He received a 2009 LRI Excellence in Education Award, and currently leads CCLCM and CLINSCHOP clinical research methods journal clubs.

Dr. Imrey is a Fellow of both the American Statistical Association and the American College of Epidemiology. His national and international activities have included President, Eastern North American Region, International Biometric Society; Chair of the American Statistical Association’s Biometrics Section and Section on Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences and the American Public Health Association’s Statistics Section; terms on the respective governing councils of each of these societies; service on two National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences committees, an FDA committee, and American Statistical Association Committees on Women in Statistics and on Professional Ethics; long-term involvements with the Task Force on Design and Analysis in Oral Health Research, the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience, and the National Institute of Statistical Sciences Writing Workshop for Junior Researchers; many NIH, NSF and Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) grant review panels; and multiple NIH data safety monitoring and external advisory committees. He has served as Associate Editor of three statistical journals and the second edition of the Wiley Encyclopedia of Biostatistics. He is currently the Data Safety Monitoring Board biostatistician for two research consortia and a single study funded by three NIH institutes, and on the editorial boards of JDR Clinical and Translational Research and the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, from which he recently received one of five 2022 Reviewer of the Year awards.

Education & Professional Highlights

Coming soon.