Biography

Dr. Krakauer is a collaborative biostatistician whose research interests include decision theory, Bayesian statistics, missing data, selection bias, and quantitative communication. Dr. Krakauer received her PhD in biostatistics from the University of Washington in 2021. Her dissertation spanned 2 statistical fields of study: missing data and decision theory.

In her first project, Dr. Krakauer and Dr. Mauricio Sadinle developed a method to estimate the association between potential health determinants and a health outcome that is subject to missing data, or “missingness.” Under these circumstances, investigators must generally make strong, unverifiable assumptions about the reason for missingness to conduct analyses. By using data on the outcome from sources outside the current study, the novel methodology negates the need to make such strong assumptions.

Her second and third projects, with Dr. Kenneth Rice, used decision theory — or decisions based on explicit relative losses for “incorrect” decisions. Drs. Krakauer and Rice applied decision theory to better interpret the evidential worth of significance tests. This research may be used to justify lowering the typical significance threshold of 0.05 and discourage overinterpretation of p-values that just surpass the current typical significance threshold. They further applied decision theory to reducing the Winner’s Curse — bias incurred for limiting reported research results to those that are statistically significant, as is often the case.

At KPWHRI, Dr. Krakauer is currently a statistician with the Adult Changes in Thought (ACT) study, which aims to find ways to prevent or delay dementia, and the STRIPE study, a pragmatic clinical trial on methods to manage pain.  She has previously contributed to studies and grant proposals on smoking cessation and dental health with Oral Health for Life (OH4L), quality of health care at small practices with Healthy Hearts Northwest (H2N), meningitis vaccination strategies, pharmaceutical pricing, and cancer screening procedures.