Education:

• BA, Psychology and Statistics, St. Olaf College (Northfield, MN), 2004
• PhD, Biostatistics, University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA), 2009
• Postdoctoral Fellowship, Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA), 2009-2011
• Postdoctoral Fellowship, Statistics, University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA), 2011-2013

Research Interests:

Dr. Wallace is a biostatistician with a research emphasis on the development of statistical methods to enhance personalized medicine, including machine learning algorithms, clustering, and moderators.  She primarily applies these methods to advance sleep, mood, and anxiety disorders research. Through her NIMH K01 (MH096944) focused on clustering, she developed methods to reveal homogenous subgroups based on high-dimensional multi-modal sleep data and applied clustering to define heterogeneity in cross-diagnostic samples.  Following her K01, she received R01 support from the NIA (R01NIA056331) to develop a large, harmonized database including multiple sleep cohorts of older adults. With these data, she applies machine learning and her cutting-edge multivariable clustering approaches to study the association between multivariable sleep health and mortality in older adults.  Dr. Wallace has also been integral in demonstrating and applying statistical methods for optimal combined moderators that utilize machine learning to characterize subgroups of individuals for whom one treatment or experimental condition may have a desirable or undesirable effect relative to the other.

Current Research Funding:

• R21 DA045137 (Co-I): Cognitive Remediation and Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation to Aid Smokers with Schizophrenia, 2017-2019.
• R01 AA025626 (Co-I): Proximal Prospective Associations between Circadian Alignment, Reward Function and Alcohol Use in Adolescents, 2017-2022.
• R01 HL135218 (Co-I): Postpartum Weight Retention and Cardiometabolic Disparities: The Effects of Contextual, Psychosocial, and Behavioral Factors, 2017-2022.
• R21 MH112770 (Co-I): Testing the Causal Role of Orbitofrontal Cortex in Human Compulsive Behavior: A Non-invasive Brain Stimulation Study, 2017-2019.
• Staunton Foundation (Co-I): School Avoidance and Virtual School Consultation (VSC), 2017-2023.
• R01 AG056331 (PI): Sleep Health Profiles and Mortality Risk in Older Adults: A Multi-Cohort Application of Novel Statistical Methods, 2017-2020.
• R03 MH116478 (Co-I): Cutting-Edge Clustering of Emotional Reactivity to Reveal Novel Anxiety Subtypes, 2018-2020.
• R01 MH113827 (Co-I): Characterize Differences in Sleep Spindles between Clinical High Risk and Healthy Controls Longitudinally , 2018-2022.
• R01 DA044143 (Co-I): Delayed Sleep Phase and Risk for Adolescent Substance Use, 2018-2023.
• R01 MH116005 (Co-I): Sleep-Dependent Negative Overgeneralization in Peripubertal Anxiety, 2018-2023.
• R01 AA025617 (Co-I): Understanding Differences in Risk for Alcohol Problems between Black and White Drinkers: Integrating Alcohol Response, Stress, and Drinking Motives, 2018-2023.
• R01 AA026249 (Co-I): Positive and Negative Reinforcement Pathways Underlying Sleep and Alcohol Use Associations, 2018-2023.

Selected Publications:

1. Wallace ML, Frank E, Kraemer HC.   A novel approach for developing and interpreting treatment moderator profiles. JAMA Psychiatry. 2013 Nov;70(11):1241-7. doi: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2013.1960. PubMed PMID: 24048258.
2. Wallace ML. Time-dependent tree-structured survival analysis with unbiased variable selection through permutation tests. Stat Med. 2014 Nov 30;33(27):4790-804. doi: 10.1002/sim.6261. PubMed PMID: 25043382.
3. Wallace ML, Simsek B, Kupfer DJ, Swartz HA, Fagiolini A, Frank E. An approach to revealing clinically relevant subgroups across the mood spectrum. J Affect Disord. 2016 Oct; 203: 265-74.  doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2016.06.019. PubMed PMID: 27314873.
4. Wallace ML, McMakin DL, Tan PZ, Rosen D, Forbes EE, Ladouceur CD, Ryan ND, Siegle GJ, Dahl RE, Kendall PC, Mannarino A (2017).  The role of day-to-day emotions, sleep, and social interactions in pediatric anxiety treatment. Behav Res Ther. 2017 Mar;90:87-95.  doi: 10.1016/j.brat.2016.12.012. PubMed PMID: 28013054.
5. Wallace ML, Stone K, Smagula SF, Hall MH Simsek B, Kado D, Redline S, Vo Tien, Buysse DJ, Osteoporotic Fractures in Men (MrOS) Study Research Group.  Which sleep health characteristics predict all-cause mortality in older men? An application of flexible multivariable methods. SLEEP. 2018 Jan 1; 41(1). doi: 10.1093/sleep/zsx189. PubMed PMID: 29165696.
6. Wallace ML, Buysse DJ, Germain A, Hall MH, Iyengar S. Variable selection for skewed model-based clustering: Application to the identification of novel sleep phenotypes.  J Am Stat Assoc. 2018; 113(521): 95-110.  doi: 10.1080/01621459.2017.1330202
7. Wallace ML, Banihashemi L, O’Donnell C, Nimgaonkar VL, Kodavali C, McNamee R, Germain A. Using optimal combined moderators to define heterogeneity in neural responses to randomized conditions: Application to the effect of sleep loss on fear learning.  NeuroImage 2018 Nov 1;181:718-727. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.07.051 PubMed PMID: 29480752.
8. Wallace ML, Buysse DJ, Redline S, Stone K, Ensrud K, Leng Y, Ancoli-Israel S, Hall MH. Multidimensional sleep and mortality in older adults: A machine-learning comparison with other risk factors. The Journals of Gerontology, Series A, Epub Ahead of Print. doi: 10.1093/gerona/glz044.

PubMed Profile