Howard J. Cabral, PhD

Bio

Howard Cabral is Professor of Biostatistics, a co-director of the Biostatistics Graduate Program since 2003, and the founding Director of the Biostatistics and Research Design Program of the Boston University Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. He has over 30 years of teaching, consulting, collaborating, and statistical research experience in a variety of biomedical fields. These include public health, epidemiology, behavioral sciences, health services, and basic physical sciences research and practice.  His research spans both observational studies and randomized clinical trials, including well known studies in cardiovascular health and studies of the effects of substance use on human health across the life span, with over 290 peer-reviewed publications to-date. He has extensive experience in the analysis of longitudinal health data, especially those collected in urban areas with ethnic and socioeconomic diversity. His methodological interests are in the analysis of longitudinal data, the effects of missing data on statistical estimation, and statistical computing.

Dr. Cabral’s collaborative research has most recently examined the effects of prenatal cocaine exposure on development from birth through age 22, randomized trials of problem solving education in treating parental depression, a randomized trial testing a peer-based model in retaining those infected with HIV in primary care, models to enhance the care of homeless patients living with HIV, differences in child and maternal health in those who did and did not received intervention through assisted reproductive technologies (ART) linking vital statistics, administrative public health and clinical databases in Massachusetts, and the neurobiological changes in the brain among normally aging animals as well as those resulting from stroke, dementia, and Parkinson’s disease among participants in the Framingham Heart Study. He is also a statistical consultant to the Institute of Community Health in Malden, MA.. Dr. Cabral provided his research and statistical methodologic expertise to a review panel of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Science that examined the effects of parental depression on parenting practices and child development and published a widely recognized book on its findings. He is also a developer of the BODE Index for risk prediction in patients with COPD, a nationally and internationally employed tool for risk assessment that has been cited in the literature over 2,000 times to-date. Dr. Cabral received the Norman A. Scotch Award for Excellence in Teaching for 2017 from the BU School of Public Health.