Sanjib Basu

Professor and Director of Graduate and
Undergraduate Studies

DuSable Hall 359E  
phone: 753-6799
basu@math.niu.edu

Statistical Consulting Services webpage

Dr. Basu is a professor of statistics who earned his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1991. Dr. Basu works in Bayesian and computational statistics.

He is interested in the development of statistical methods and their applications in problems in biomedicine, especially in cancer treatment, and to a lesser extent, in statistical applications in problems in engineering. In a recent research paper in the Journal of the American Statistical Association (a premier statistics journal), he and his collaborators developed flexible statistical methods for modeling and predicting rates of breast, prostate, colorectal and other cancers. Interestingly, they noticed a strong connection between increase and decrease of smoking rates among males and females and increase and decrease in lung cancer rates among males and females about 10-15 years later. In another research paper (to appear in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Ser. A), he and his collaborators at the National Cancer Institute, investigate whether some of the breast cancer patients can be considered to be cured from cancer with the advances made in cancer treatment.

He collaborates with physicians, nurses and other biomedical researchers at NIU and other universities. In these collaborative projects, he and his collaborators have investigated what genes and proteins, and more importantly, what collection of genes and proteins and what pathways may play important roles in the progression and survival from cancer and whether genetic and epigenetic differences may be able to partially explain the ethnic difference in many cancers. In engineering applications, they looked at time to failure of computers and whether it was caused by failure of hard drive or the competing risk of failure of power supply.

He has been in the Division of Statistics at NIU since 1996. He was the undergraduate and graduate studies director, once during 1999-2001, and more recently from 2005-08. He mostly works on Bayesian statistics which often requires lots of numerical computations and simulations by Markov chain sampling. He received his Ph.D. from Purdue University, and now, he is a professor at NIU, associate editor of some statistics journals, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.