PhD
Assistant Professor
Location:
UNC Hospitals – Chapel Hill
Education and Training:
Ph.D. in Biostatistics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Ph.D. in Mathematics, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC
MS in Mathematics, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania
BS in Mathematics, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania
Summary Statement:
Dr. Cornea’s main research is to apply advanced innovative statistical and computational designs to study the brain and cognitive development in early childhood and pre-adolescence of healthy children as well as high-risk children prenatally exposed to maternal psychiatric conditions. Early childhood is a period of rapid structural and functional brain development that is implicated in the pathogenesis of disorders such as autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), intellectual disability, and many psychiatric disorders. Pre-adolescence is a period in which cognitive and behavioral abnormalities associated with psychiatric diseases, including executive function, attention, and anxiety, are emerging. Dr. Cornea has primary responsibility in analyzing brain structural and diffusion tensor imaging data and their association with cognitive-behavioral data for cross-sectional and longitudinal singleton and twin studies. His research also includes work on analyzing curved data aimed at developing a general regression framework for a manifold-valued response in a Riemannian symmetric space and its association with Euclidean covariates of interest, like age and gender. Such curved data arise in neuroimaging studies as part of shape analysis. The theoretical methods include multiscale adaptive generalized estimation equations and the design of mixed-effects models for manifold-value data.
