Zihuan Cao, PhD, is an Assistant Professor (Research) at the Weight Control and Diabetes Research Center in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and a Biostatistician at The Miriam Hospital.
Dr. Cao specializes in developing and applying advanced statistical methodologies to support research on health behaviors and health outcomes. His expertise includes longitudinal data analysis, mediation modeling, propensity score methods, and Bayesian approaches. He collaborates on NIH-funded projects, providing critical support in study design, power analysis, data management, and statistical modeling.
Dr. Cao received his PhD in Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology from Fordham University in 2024. His research focuses on effect size measures for mediation analysis with binary and multicategorical predictors, which he developed during his doctoral studies. At WCDRC, he has contributed to various studies, including a large NIH-funded trial optimizing online obesity treatment (R01 DK117857).
Dr. Cao is dedicated to leveraging quantitative methods to advance research in behavioral health, with a particular focus on developing statistical tools to address complex research questions.
