Harvard Catalyst Profiles

David Wypij 's main activities and interests focus on active collaboration in pediatric clinical research studies and in biostatistical education and administration. Recent work has implemented novel methods in longitudinal data analysis, semiparametric regression, classification and regression trees, mobility measures based on Markov chains, and vaccine efficacy modeling in medical and public health studies.
In work at Children's Hospital Boston, Dr. Wypij collaborates on several randomized clinical trials and follow-up studies that compare the incidence of brain injury after operative strategies in infant heart surgery. The focus has been on the neurodevelopment of subjects as measured through psychological and psychiatric testing, neurologic evaluation, and brain assessment by magnetic resonance imaging, postoperatively through 18 years of age. He directs the Data Coordinating Center for the RESTORE study, assessing a new sedation management algorithm in pediatric patients with acute lung injury in a group-randomized 21-center study with over 2700 patients, and for the TECS study, assessing the efficacy of strict glycemic control in reducing infection in postoperative pediatric cardiac surgery patients in a randomized 2-center study with over 900 patients. Dr. Wypij also collaborates on longitudinal studies of associations between the sexual orientation of adolescents and young adults and health risk behaviors such as alcohol and drug use, eating disorders, and stress and self-esteem. He has collaborated on many other studies with investigators from the Departments of Adolescent Medicine, Cardiology, Cardiac Surgery, Neurology, Psychiatry, and Radiology at Children's Hospital.
Dr. Wypij also collaborates with the Severe Malaria in African Children (SMAC) clinical research network, involving investigators in the United States, Africa, and Europe. Recent work has focused on the association of acid/base balance and pigment to malaria mortality in a cohort of over 26,000 hospital admissions in five African countries. Current focus is on the use of classification trees, generalized additive models, and frailty survival models to predict mortality among African malaria patients, as well as assessing the clinical significance of eye examinations in predicting "true" cerebral malaria and to brain histology (in fatal cases).
As Director of Graduate Studies, Dr. Wypij oversees admissions and recruitment, funding, student advising, orientation, teaching and research assistantships, and related student administration activities in the Department of Biostatistics at HSPH. He is an award-winning teacher at HSPH, and he has also taught short courses in biostatistics and clinical research methods in Brazil, Gabon, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and at Children's Hospital Boston.