NEW YORK, Nov. 02, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Nicholas Lange, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, has been selected to join the Education Board at the American Health Council. He will be sharing his knowledge and expertise in the areas of Biostatistics, Brain Imaging, and Autism Research.
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Dr. Lange’s continuing contributions to science over more than 30 years have been in the development and application of novel methodology for longitudinal and clustered data to investigate typical and atypical human and non-human brain development in psychotic disorders, spatial patterns of brain cells, and brain-behavior associations in autism.
Dr. Nicholas Lange, also a Biostatistician at McLean Hospital, has led and continues to lead multi-disciplinary teams of biostatisticians and other scientists that have made, and will continue to make, significant gains in the basic, translational, and clinical science of the developing human brain. McLean Hospital is the largest psychiatric affiliate of Harvard Medical School and a leader in scientific medical research and medical education.
Inspired by his early work with both children and adults with autism, Dr. Lange redirected his research program in the psychotic disorders to conduct various research studies of people on the autism spectrum. It is his continuing desire to foster high-quality biostatistical thinking, methods, and practice to further our understanding of the diagnosis, treatment, course, and outcome in autism and other mental disorders, with the overarching goal of improving the lives of individuals with mental illnesses and changing policy to increase funding from local, state, national, and international governments, institutions, private foundations, and private donations.
Dr. Lange regularly conducts multisite studies of brain development and concomitant psychophysical correlates in autism and searches for clinically relevant candidate intermediate phenotypes of the disorder. He has conducted a clinical trial of two early intervention programs in autism and an incipient clinical trial of ECT treatment for the elderly with major cognitive deficits and extreme anxiety.
Dr. Lange credits his success to his vision, persistence, hard work, and mentors who have taught and helped inspire him to reach his personal and professional goals. He is honored to have contributed to scientific knowledge regarding biology-based identification of those individuals who have been diagnosed with autism. Dr. Lange has been published in many theoretical and applied statistics and medical journals, opinion pieces (as in Nature on Imaging Autism), and a variety of editorials.
His goals over the next five years include making major discoveries in brain-mind-behavior associations and causes in autism that significantly increase clinical utility and effectiveness for the individual with autism.
Dr. Lange’s many awards and honors include the Robert B. Reed Prize for Outstanding Scholarship, Harvard Biostatistics; Invited Article of the Year, Journal of the American Statistical Association; Invited Paper, Royal Statistical Society in (London), the first article on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) published in the statistical literature; and Certificate of Service and Appreciation, Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. He was appointed to a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Scientific Advisory Panel to evaluate the sites chosen for their nationwide early autism research network. Dr. Lange has also been included in the Marquis Who’s Who in Science and Engineering and the Marquis Who’s Who in America.
He is a member of the International Society for Autism Research. He also works with Autism Speaks and the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Lange received his MS in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1981 and his PhD in Biostatistics from the Harvard University School of Public Health in 1986.
Dr. Nicholas Lange’s greatest personal achievement has been raising his children Sarah and Nick. He finds great joy in spending time with them and his four adorable granddaughters - Ella, Adeline, Isabel, and Meghan – and his amiguita Margarita. In his free time, Dr. Lange enjoys playing classical and rock guitar, traveling, learning more Spanish, philosophy and the philosophy of statistics, and early practice of Eastern Christianity.