Nikki Freeman, MA

PhD candidate
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

​Nikki Freeman is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and holds a MA in Economics from Duke University. Her work is focused on developing methods for precision medicine and the application of the precision medicine framework to vascular medicine. Before attending UNC, she was a research associate in the Center for Advanced Methods Development at RTI International and a research assistant in the Division of Public Health Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. She believes that precision medicine is a team sport and that statistical leadership is crucial for the translation of precision medicine into real world contexts.

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Workshop: Introduction to Precision Medicine: From Statistics to Society
October 26, 2022; 10:00am - 11:00am

Precision medicine aims to learn from data how to match the right treatment to the right person at the right time. One common goal in precision medicine is the estimation of optimal dynamic treatment regimes (DTRs), sequences of decision rules that recommend treatments to patients in a way that, if followed, would optimize outcomes for each individual and overall in the targeted population. In this presentation, we will describe how the precision medicine framework formalizes sequential clinical decision-making and briefly review a subset of most popular strategies for learning optimal dynamic treatment regimes. We will then invite the workshop group to ideate and discuss the critical opportunities and challenges for the translation of DTRs to clinical and community care, the role for stakeholder engagement and cross-disciplinary collaboration, and considerations for evaluating DTRs in practice. ​

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