Emma Davies Smith

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Biography

Emma Davies Smith completed her Ph.D. in Biostatistics at the University of Western Ontario in August 2023, where she developed statistical methods for cluster randomized trials with multiple endpoints. The FDA now suggests trials for complex diseases, like Alzheimer's Disease or Crohn's Disease, use multiple endpoints to capture wide-ranging treatment effects, but this complicates design, analysis, and interpretation. She hopes her work will provide direct answers to the billion-dollar question, "Do individuals on treatment respond better than those on control?" and enable insights into the complex risk-benefit trade-offs faced by care providers and their patients every day.

Emma then pursued a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in September 2023. Partly funded by the AIDS Training Grant, she collaborated closely with the Center for Biostatistics in AIDS Research (CBAR) on important secondary analyses of the largest trial in adults living with HIV yet, REPRIEVE. Of note, a comparison of the cardiovascular risks of abacavir- versus tenofovir-containing antiretroviral therapies, which has important implications for the modern treatment of people living with HIV.

Emma formally joined CBAR in October 2024 as a Research Associate for IMPAACT, where she hopes her efforts will have real public health implications for populations historically understudied by clinical trials (pregnant women and children). She is currently acting as the lead statistician for IMPAACT 2016, an individually randomized group treatment trial evaluating the impacts of trauma-informed cognitive behavioral therapy (TI-CBT) on mental health symptoms and ART adherence among youth living with HIV.

Education and Training

• M.Sc., Applied Statistics
  University of Guelph
• Ph.D., Biostatistics
  University of Western Ontario
• B.Sc., Statistics
  University of Guelph

Awards and Honors

• CROI New Investigator Award, 2025
  Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections

Publications

• Effects of antiretrovirals on major adverse cardiovascular events in the REPRIEVE trial: a longitudinal cohort analysis.

  Fichtenbaum CJ, Malvestutto CD, Watanabe MG, Davies Smith E, Ribaudo HJ, McCallum S, Fitch KV, Currier JS, Diggs MR, Chu SM, Aberg JA, Lu MT, Valencia J, Gómez-Ayerbe C, Brar I, Valdez Madruga J, Bloomfield GS, Douglas PS, Zanni MV, Grinspoon SK. Lancet HIV 2025 Jun 04

  PMID: 40482662

• Rank-based estimators of global treatment effects for cluster randomized trials with multiple endpoints on different scales.

  Davies Smith E, Jairath V, Zou G. Stat Methods Med Res 2025 May 14

  PMID: 40368381

• Cardiovascular Hazards of Abacavir- Versus Tenofovir-Containing Antiretroviral Therapies: Insights From an Analysis of the REPRIEVE Trial Cohort.

  Davies Smith E, Malvestutto C, Ribaudo HJ, Fichtenbaum CJ, Aberg JA, Watanabe M, Bloomfield GS, Currier JS, Chu SM, Fitch KV, Diggs MR, Bedimo R, Valencia J, Gomez-Ayerbe C, Brar I, Madruga JV, Lu MT, Douglas PS, Zanni MV, Grinspoon SK. Open Forum Infect Dis 2025

  PMID: 40207047

• A rank-based approach to design and analysis of pretest-posttest randomized trials, with application to COVID-19 ordinal scale data.

  Zou G, Smith EJ, Zou L, Qiu SF, Shu D. Contemp Clin Trials 2023

  PMID: 36657521

• A nonparametric approach to confidence intervals for concordance index and difference between correlated indices.

  Zou G, Smith E, Jairath V. J Biopharm Stat 2022 Sep 03

  PMID: 35216545