Biography
Frances M. Yang, PhD was on faculty at Harvard Medical School prior to becoming Assistant Professor of EEpidemiology, Department of Population Health Sciences, Medical College of Georgia, Augusta University. She received advanced training in psychometrics and epidemiology from Harvard Medical School after completing her PhD in Gerontology at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA USA.
She is currently the subcontract Principal Investigator (PI) on the NINDS/NIH R01 NS086882 “Neuroimaging and Neuropsychological Biomarkers of Vascular Risk Factors” in collaboration with Harvard Medical School. She is the current Chair of the International Society for the Quality of Life Research, Psychometrics Special Interest Group. She is passionate about using item response theory (IRT) to examine the properties of patient reported outcomes (PROs) for quality of life in older adults, which includes cognitive and mental health. She is the co-author of “Measurement and the Measurement of Change,” which was published in 2015 by Wolters Kluwer/Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. She has helped examine and develop PROs in the areas of HIV, cardiovascular comorbidities, quality of life, recovery from substance abuse, depression, and cognitive measures. She has groundbreaking manuscripts using latent variable modeling to identify classification of clinical symptoms and syndromes to predict subsequent health outcomes in epidemiological datasets. She currently has over 50 peer-reviewed publications.
At the Medical College of Georgia, Augusta University, she was the Curriculum Director of both Evidence-Based Medicine and Geriatrics where she taught 600 medical students and 300 public and allied health sciences students each year. She was the PI of two Patient Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) Awards from the Georgia Board of Regents to examine quality of life in patients living with end-stage renal disease and diabetes. She has been in collaboration with the Augusta University Sickle Cell Center to examine quality of life for sickle cell patients, especially with regards to measuring the prescription patterns of physicians for opioids and other pain medication. In collaboration with the Georgia Cancer Center at Augusta University, she has examined the epidemiology of cancer disparities in the US population, specifically for oral cancer and breast cancer using the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program data.
Dr. Yang was awarded the prestigious National Research Service Award, National Institutes of Health Translational T32 post-doctoral research fellowship from Harvard Medical School, Harvard Medical School Livingston Fellowship, and the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression Young Investigator Award to examine the effect of cardiovascular diseases and risk factors on how older patients report their depressive symptomatology. She also received the Center for Advancing Longitudinal Drug Abuse Research (CALDAR) Emerging Investigator Award through the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) to use latent variable modeling, specifically IRT, to develop a measure of recovery from substance abuse that follows the protocol of the NIH Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS), as the Principal Investigator. She was a co-investigator on the “Patient Reported Outcomes in Clinical Care of Patients with HIV” awarded to the NIH/NIAMS to the University of Washington.
She was also the PI of the “Longitudinal Clinicopathology of Alzheimer’s Disease, Vascular and Mixed Dementias” awarded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) through the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center (RADC). She was the PI of the “Patient Reported Outcomes for Renal Disease Patients After the Occurrence of Fracture,” which examined survival and quality of life among renal disease patients who have fractured through primary data collection and secondary data analysis of over 6,000 end-stage renal disease patients.
