Victor Kipnis, Ph.D.

Victor Kipnis, Ph.D., is a Mathematical Statistician and Special Assistant in the Office of the Deputy Director.

Dr. Kipnis previously led the Biometry Research Group by providing key statistical support and resources to the Division of Cancer Prevention (DCP), National Cancer Institute (NCI), NIH (National Institutes of Health (NIH), and other national and international institutions. Dr. Kipnis has assured that group activities remain broad in nature and range from statistical reviews and consultations to development of statistical methodologies addressing rigor and reproducibility of biomedical research.

One important area of Dr. Kipnis’s research is related to statistical problems of multiplicity and selectivity, especially in omics studies. Omics research often generates complex high-dimensional data that are particularly prone to overfitting and can lead to results that may look promising using discovery samples but do not hold on other samples. The other area involves biomedical studies with measurement error. Dr. Kipnis is a highly respected international leader in the field – he has given numerous invited talks at national and international conferences and has authored numerous pivotal publications examining the effects of measurement error on study design and analysis, and methods of adjusting for it in epidemiology and surveillance. Under Dr. Kipnis’s leadership, the Biometry Research Group is the only group within NIH with the statistical expertise in measurement error. An example of its activity is the new methodology for measurement error adjustment in nutritional research known as the NCI Method.

Dr. Kipnis received a M.S. in mathematics in 1971 and a Ph.D. in statistics in 1978 from the Moscow State University, Russia, and has been teaching and conducting statistical research in the US since 1986. Dr. Kipnis joined the Biometry Research group in 1992.