Joseph E. Schwartz, PhD

Dr. Joseph Schwartz is an internationally recognized leader in the fields of cardiovascular behavioral medicine and quantitative methodology. He is an elected Fellow of the Society of Behavioral Medicine and the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, a member of the American Psychosomatic Society, American Society of Hypertension, North American Artery, and the former MacArthur Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health. He has been the Principal Investigator (PI) or Project Leader of numerous federally-funded research grants and co-investigator, biostatistician or statistical consultant on many more. Currently, he is the PI of an NHLBI program project grant (Psychosocial Factors and Cardiovascular Disease). Within the program project, he has led the Work Site Blood Pressure Study from 1991-2003 (59 publications in peer-reviewed journals) and, since then, the ongoing Masked Hypertension Study. He has also led the Data Management and Statistics Core of this, a second PPG, and a large U01 contract. His areas of statistical expertise include multilevel models for continuous and binary data (especially intensive repeated measures data), structural equation models, survival analysis, the impact of measurement and misclassification errors on statistical analyses, and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis for the assessment of diagnostic biomarkers. He has considerable experience conducting and analyzing data from randomized controlled trials. He recently served on the Data Safety Monitoring Board for a smoking cessation RCT, and he is the biostatistician for two recently completed RCTs. Also, in collaboration with others, he has contributed to the collection and analysis of data pertaining to quality of life and depressive symptoms among patients with heart failure and other cardiovascular disease. He recently completed an R01 that involved the collection of 30-45 days of actigraphy data in a cohort of patients with acute coronary syndromes, and he has extensive experience analyzing 24-hour continuously ascertained data (ambulatory blood pressure, actigraphy, diary/EMA, HRV). He has successfully mentored many junior faculty members, including the K23 awards of Dr. Karina Davidson and 5 other early career researchers.