Laura J. Simon

Lecturer of Statistics, Teaching Fellow
Ph.D., Penn State University, 2002
M.A., Penn State University, 1991

Summary of research interests

As Lecturer of Statistics, Dr. Simon is primarily interested in teaching statistical concepts to undergraduate math majors and to non-statisticians in the biostatistical and health sciences fields. As her courses illustrate, she is a proponent of active hands-on and web-based statistical education. She co-authored nine units of the web-based introductory statistics text, Visualizing Statistics (Cybergnostics, Inc.). Other professional interests include biostatistical consulting, repeated measures modeling, clinical trials development, research data management, and web-page programming.

Prior to moving to the University Park campus in 1996, Dr. Simon worked for four years at the Center for Biostatistics and Epidemiology at Penn State's College of Medicine in Hershey, Pennsylvania. While there, she consulted with over 40 different medical researchers, and provided overall leadership to the Data Management Unit on numerous projects, including the National Interstitial Cystitis Database Study.

Prior to working at Penn State, Dr. Simon was a statistician at Auke Bay Research Laboratory in Auke Bay, Alaska, and a visiting summer statistician at Rohm and Haas Research Laboratories in Spring House, Pennsylvania.

Representative publications

Simon, LJ, Landis JR, Tomaszewski JE, Nyberg LM and the ICDB Study Group. The Interstitial Cystitis Data Base (ICDB) Study. In: Sant, GR, editor. Interstitial Cystitis. Philadelphia: Lippincott-Raven, 1997.

Simon, LJ, Landis, JR, Erickson, DR, Nyberg, LM, and the ICDB Study Group. The Interstitial Cystitis Data Base (ICDB) Study: Concepts and Preliminary Baseline Descriptive Statistics. Urology 49 (Supplement 5A): 64-75, 1997.

Samkoff JS, Hockenberry S, Simon LJ, Jones RL. Mortality of young physicians. Academic Medicine 70(3): 242-244, 1995.

Erickson DR, Simon LJ, Belchis DA. Relationships between cystoscopic, pathologic, and subjective features in patients with symptoms of interstitial cystitis. Urology 44(5): 655-659, 1994.

Slawson DC, Bennett JH, Simon LJ, Herman JM. Should all women with cervical atypia be referred for colposcopy: A HARNET Study. The Journal of Family Practice 38: 387-392, 1994.

Pella J, Rumbaugh R, Simon LJ, Dahlberg M, Pennoyer S, Rose M. Incidental and illegal catches of salmonids in North Pacific squid driftnet fisheries. Proceedings of the International North Pacific Fisheries Commission 1991 Symposium, Tokyo, Japan, April 1992.