Richard Amdur PhD

Dr. Richard L. Amdur, PhD, is a Lead Biostatistician at George Washington University. Dr. Amdur attended Michigan State University for graduate school. There, he worked with John Hunter, one of the pioneers in developing structural equation modeling, and this served as the basis for his dissertation, an analysis of treatment mechanisms using 10 years of data from a series of randomized trials of treatments for juvenile delinquency, based on a community psychology approach, with his advisor, William S. Davidson. He then worked with the Michigan Department of Mental Health to develop a typology of patients in the state’s community mental health system, using new methods of cluster analysis of subjects. His post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan focused on learning an engineering approach to the design and development of new mental health interventions, which were applied to the development of cognitive behavioral interventions for panic disorder.

Dr. Amdur’s first ‘real job’ was as a staff psychologist at the Toledo VA Outpatient Clinic, and later at the Ann Arbor VA Medical Center, in the newly deployed PTSD Clinical Team. Later, he became the Associate Chief of the PTSD clinic, responsible for day-to-day clinical operations, training, and supervision of psychology interns and post-doctoral fellows, both at the VA and at the University of Michigan Department of Psychiatry, while he carried a full clinical caseload. He then moved to the DC VA, where he began a new focus on psychiatric genetics, while also serving as the Training Director for the new psychology post-doctoral training program. There, he created and led the Biostatistics Core, providing statistical consulting, grant writing, and data analysis to the entire medical center. He moved to GW Medical Faculty Associates, where I was the Lead Biostatistician and a Clinical Professor in the Department of Surgery.

Currently, Dr. Amdur serves as a biostatistician on five funded NIH grants, and one industry-funded grant. He has worked with large state-wide mental health data for the State of Michigan Department of Mental Health, national VA data on over 8 million active patients, and a variety of national surgical databases including ACS-NSQIP, TQIP, NCDB, and NIS. He is a skilled SAS programmer and has taught data analysis methods for the past 15 years while supervising other team members and trainees.