My primary appointment is in UNC’s Center for Neurosensory Disorders, where I study chronic pain conditions. I am involved with the OPPERA study, which is a large-scale prospective study to identify the risk factors of temporo-mandibular disorder. I also work on several smaller studies on arthritis and other chronic pain conditions. In particular, I recently began a study to identify risk factors for dysmenorrhea (severe pain during menstruation) and other chronic pain conditions that are specific to women. My statistical research interests include machine learning and statistical genetics. I am developing novel methods to predict the risk of disease (or other outcomes) based on high-throughput genetic data (such as microarrays or genome-wide association studies) and methods to identify clusters in complex, high-dimensional data sets.