Featured Investigators
Hwanseok W. Choi, PhD
Dr. Choi is an associate professor of biostatistics in the Department of Public Health in the School of Health Professions at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM) in Hattiesburg, MS. He serves as a Faculty Senate at the present institution and an advisory member for the Dean of the College.
His most recent research topic is to improve rural health among minority population by decreasing obesity or obesity-related diseases. Since 2015, he has been working as a co-investigator and a biostatistician for the NIH funded project which is to alleviate obesity and chronic disease disparities in rural African Americans in Mississippi using church-based program to deliver health resources via telehealth. In addition, he have been working with researchers of various fields such as Social Work (Community resilience, Disaster preparedness, & Mental health), Kinesiology, Nursing (The Contribution of Registered Nurses in Anesthesia Practice in South Korea), Biology (Factorial Analysis of Error Correction Performance Using Simulated Next-Generation Sequencing Data), and Geography using structural equation modeling (SEM), logistic regression, survival analysis, mixed models, and so on. Recently, one of the project with a faculty in the Kinesiology department, “Targeting the Peripheral Vasculature through Intermittent Pneumatic Compression in Spinal Cord Injury,” was finally funded by the American Heart Association (AHA), which will begin in summer, 2019.
Before joining in the current position, he has been working as a biostatistician at the Division of Preventive Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) for four years. While having participated in many projects, he participated in the well-known, long-term project, CARDIA (Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults). Throughout the experience, he has built up the most recent statistical methods knowledge and current programming skills with SAS, STATA, R, M-Plus, and others. And, he experienced various measurement tools in epidemiology, behavioral science, and public health. In addition, he has participated in the Tumor Registry report for recent three years, which is prepared by the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center and UAB. Survival analysis, trend analysis, and mapping using ArcGIS were involved in that project. Also, he worked in several CARDIA ancillary studies, for example, Drug Use and Health Outcomes in CARDIA (DUHO) using trajectory analysis, mixed model, multiple imputations for missing data, etc. He also got involved in the project named DPBRN (Dental Practice-Based Research Network) in which multiple centers participated with multiple surveys, which made it hard to manage to clean, reorganize, and generate more variables.
His main interest in the statistical methods is multivariate time series clustering using kernel variant multi-way principal component analysis (KMPCA). Clustering multivariate time series data has been a challenging task for researchers since data has multiple dimensions to consider such as auto-correlations and cross-correlations. He has been working on a research to find an intervention program for young adults to adapt a healthy drinking to reduce obesity prevalence in Mississippi.