Dr. Sofer is a researcher in public health sciences. I love working with data: the bigger and more complex – the better. I love solving challenges in making statistical and computing methods more efficient and elegant. And most of all, I love working with other creative and passionate people.  She is an Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School, Associate Biostatistician and Director of the Biostatistics core of the program in Sleep Epidemiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital.

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Dr. Sofer' journey in Biostatistical research began in her doctoral studies, when she worked on variable selection, a set of statistical analyses approaches to find which are important variables out of a set of potential variables (for example, which genotypes are associated with BMI, when you have many candidate genotypes?). At that time, she also worked a lot on applications in the field of environmental health, where she was trying to develop useful statistical methods to answer questions such as “how various air pollution measures influence DNA methylation?"

Later, during her postdoc, she developed and applied semi-parametric and causal-inference methods to estimate effects in observational studies, that account and correct for various biases such as selection bias, occurring when one the actual population observed in a study is not the “general population”, but rather a subset that stayed on, or was selected for, a specific treatment of interest.

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Between 2014 and 2017 she was a research scientist at a group called “Genetic Analysis Center”, at the University of Washington. She spent a lot of time working on the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos, a longitudinal study that follows a population of Hispanics/Latinos. She became fascinated with this population, which is very diverse, both environmentally and genetically. She developed and applied various statistical methods inspired by this study, and she is still interested in studying diverse and underserved populations, where she believes public health research has much to contribute.

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Currenly, she is focusing her research on sleep and related traits, and combining all her passions together for that, as sleep is affected by environmental exposures, genetics architecture, and is associated with other molecular markers.