Yates Coley, PhD, is a biostatistician whose research promotes precision medicine and learning health systems as a way to improve value and quality in health care delivery. Her statistical research focuses on methods for predicting latent health states, understanding variability in risk, and accounting for missing data. She also has particular interest in data visualization and designing decision support tools to support shared clinical decision-making.

Before starting as an assistant investigator at KPWHRI in 2016, Dr. Coley was a post-doctoral research fellow at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where she worked with Dr. Scott Zeger. She is a co-investigator on a Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) methodology grant: “Bayesian hierarchical methods for the design and analysis of studies to individualize health care” (PI: Zeger). This research promises to establish a solid statistical framework for more intelligent, individualized health care provision.

While at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Coley also worked with urologists to develop a prediction model that enables personalized management of low-risk prostate cancer. She has designed an interactive decision support tool that calculates and communicates patients’ predictions in real-time and is currently building the statistical structure necessary to support a continuously learning model. The resulting prediction tool will be integrated into the clinical workflow in such a way that new observations will be automatically incorporated into the existing model, improving both patient-level predictions as well as researchers’ understanding of risk in the population.

Dr. Coley completed her PhD in biostatistics at the University of Washington. Her dissertation research proposed methods to improve effectiveness estimates in HIV prevention trials by accounting for unobserved variability in risk.

At KPWHRI, Dr. Coley collaborates on projects across a range of research areas including breast cancer imaging, bariatric surgery, and antipsychotic medications.