Razvan Romanescu, MMath, PhD

  • Portrait of Razvan Romanescu

  • Assistant professor

    College of Community and Global Health
    Rady Faculty of Health Sciences
    University of Manitoba
    Room 351, 753 McDermot Avenue
    Winnipeg, Manitoba R3E 0T6

    Phone: 204-594-5374
    Email: razvan.romanescu@umanitoba.ca

Research summary

My research in the field of Biostatistics falls into two main themes: methods in statistical genetics/ bioinformatics, and models of epidemic spread. In genetics, I am interested in devising efficient methods to analyze –omics datasets with the aim of discovering molecular signatures of disease in genes and their pathways. My focus is on combining information from a large number of tests to improve power to detect associations in designs that have small sample or effect sizes. In infectious diseases, I have been investigating mathematical network-based models of the spread of pathogens in populations, and am currently leading funded research to predict COVID-19 infections and underreporting rates.

  • Research affiliations

    Centre for Healthcare Innovation (CHI)

  • Keywords

    • biostatistics
    • genetic epidemiology
    • infectious disease models
    • methods to analyze -omics data
    • parametric inference and model identifiability
    • statistical genetics

Biography

Dr. Romanescu is an assistant professor in the College of Community and Global Health. He joined the Data Science platform at the Centre for Healthcare Innovation in January 2020 as a consulting biostatistician with the Biostatistics Group. In this capacity, he collaborates with researchers within the Rady Faculty of Health Sciences and with external clients on a variety of projects.

Dr. Romanescu’s current research focuses on methods that support statistical inference in genetic datasets, particularly in computationally complex bioinformatics problems. His work includes procedures for multiple hypothesis testing and gene set enrichment analysis, with applications to data from various conditions (genotyping, sequencing, expression, etc.).

He completed his post-doctoral training at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, where he developed models for genetic association in familial breast cancer.

Education

Postdoctoral fellow, Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital (2020)

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Applied Statistics, University of Guelph (2016)

Master of Mathematics (MMath), University of Waterloo (2009)

Bachelor of Science (BSc) (Honours), University of Toronto (2007)

Awards

Biostatistics Training Initiative Fellowship from the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, postdoctoral level (2017 - 2019)

Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) STAGE Fellowship Award, postdoctoral level (2018 - 2019)

Ontario Graduate Fellowship, doctoral level (2015 - 2016)

Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs Highly Qualified Personnel (HQP) Scholarship, doctoral level (2012 - 2015)

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Alexander Graham Bell Scholarship, Master's level (2007 - 2008)

President’s Graduate Scholarship, Master's level (2007 - 2008)

Contact us

College of Community and Global Health
Rady Faculty of Health Sciences
Room S113 - 750 Bannatyne Avenue
University of Manitoba (Bannatyne campus)
Winnipeg, MB R3E 0W3 Canada

ccgh@umanitoba.ca
204-789-3473