Susan Gray Silva

Dr. Silva is an Associate Research Professor in the Duke University School of Nursing and School of Medicine, with specialty training in neurobehavioral assessment, cognitive neuropsychology, and biostatistics. Within the PhD Program in the School of Nursing, Dr. Silva mentors students and teaches courses in General Linear Models, Generalized Linear Mixed Models, Mediator and Moderator Analyses, and Longitudinal Data Analysis. She also teaches a course in Quantitative Methods for Evaluating Health Care Practices course in the Doctor of Nursing Practices program and guides students in the design and analysis of quality improvement projects and implementation science studies.

Prior to joining the faculty in the School of Nursing in August 2009, Dr. Silva was a faculty statistician in the Clinical Trials Statistics Group and a mental health researcher in the Division of Neurosciences at Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI) and the Division of Medical Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke. While at DCRI, her focus was on the design and analysis of multi-center neuropsychiatric clinical trials.

Before coming to Duke in 1999, Dr. Silva was the Director of the Neurobehavioral Assessment Core and Associate Director of the Data Management & Biostatistics Core for the National Institute of Mental Health-funded Neuroscience Clinical Research Center at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Dr. Silva served as the Statistical PI for the NIMH’s Treatment for Adolescents with Depression Study (TADS), NIMH’s Substance Use Outcomes Following Treatment for Adolescent Depression (SOFTAD) study, NIMH’s Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Trials Network (CAPTN). She was a statistical co-investigator for NIDA’s National Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network (CTN), NICHD’s Reproductive Medicine Network (RMN), and SAMHSA’s National Center for Child Traumatic Stress. Dr. Silva has been a member of the NIMH's Data and Safety Board for Child and Adolescent Interventions and Health Services since 2002.

As a researcher and statistician, Dr. Silva's focus has been on the application of (1) multi-level mixed-effects trajectory models for longitudinal data, (2) ecological momentary assessment; (3) moderator and mediator analyses, and (4) structural equation modeling for complex moderated mediation analyses.