We are please to welcome the following department personnel:

John Kloke, PhD, has joined our Department as Assistant Scientist in biostatistics working in SDAC. He will focus on ongoing data analysis, monitoring, and reporting for phase III, multi-center industry sponsored clinical trials in support of SDAC's mission. He will also continue his ongoing methodological research on rank-based regression methods. Finally, he will provide biostatistical support to our work with ICTR and serve on a Scientific Review Committee for the SMPH. John completed his PhD in Statistics at Western Michigan and has served in faculty roles at Pomona College, Bucknell College and the University of Pittsburgh.

Kathryn Schurr, MS (July 18) and Weiqung Tong, MS (Aug 1) each recently joined the Department as Assistant Researchers in SDAC. They will support safety monitoring of multicenter clinical trials by participating in the design and creation of materials for independent Data and Safety Monitoring Committee review. Working jointly with SDAC Principal Investigators, they will create and implement analysis plans for summarization of clinical trial data. Kathryn Schurr received her MS in Biostatistics from Grand Valley State University earlier this year. Weiqung Tong received her MPH in Biostatistics and her MS in Physiological Sciences from the University of Arizona in 2010. Before coming to UW, Weiqung was a statistician in the Department of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

Congratulations to Professor David L. DeMets on being named the Max Halperin WARF (Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation) Professor for 2011. The award is intended to honor those faculty who have made major contributions to the advancement of knowledge, primarily through their research endeavors, but also as a result of their teaching and service activities. The award includes $75,000 in research support from WARF over five years.

Since receiving his PhD in 1970 from the University of Minnesota, Dr. DeMets has been very active in the design, conduct, and analysis of clinical trials in several disease areas. Following a postdoctoral appointment at the National Institutes of Health (1970-72), he spent 10 years (1972-1982) at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at the NIH where he became chief of the Biostatistics Research Branch.

He was specifically recruited in 1982 to lead the Biostatistics Core of the University of Wisconsin Clinical Cancer Center. This core became the Biostatistics Center for the Medical School in 1986, and was later granted departmental status in 1991 with Dave as its founding Chair. With the emergence of informatics and computational science in biomedicine, the department was given a charge to develop a program in medical informatics for the Medical School, and its name changed to Biostatistics and Medical Informatics in 1996.

Dr. DeMets is a recognized international leader in statistical research and methods for the analysis of clinical trials. He has collaborated in the development of statistical methods for the sequential analysis of outcome data and the design of clinical trials. He has extensive national and international clinical trial experience and has served on and chaired numerous NIH and industry sponsored Data Safety and Monitoring Committees for clinical trials in diverse disciplines.

He served on the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Cancer Institute and Board of Directors of the American Statistical Association, as well as having been President of the Society for Clinical Trials and President of the Eastern North American Region (ENAR) of the Biometric Society.

He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, the International Statistics Institute and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society for Clinical Trials and the American Medical Informatics Association.

Dave has also co-authored four texts, Fundamentals of Clinical Trials, Data Monitoring in Clinical Trials: A Case Studies Approach, Data Monitoring Committees in Clinical Trials: A Practical Perspective, and Statistical Methods for Clinical Trials.

Congratulations to Maxwell Collins, Vikas Singh, and Andrew Alexander awarded Best Application Paper at the Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV 2010) for Network connectivity via inference over curvature-regularizing line graphs.

The Department welcomes new faculty member Eneida Mendonça, MD, PhD.

She received her MD from the Federal University of Pelotas in Brazil and her PhD in Biomedical Informatics in 2002 from Columbia University in New York.

Dr. Mendonça pioneered the use of natural language processing in both biomedical literature and in electronic medical record narratives in order to identify knowledge relevant to medical decision making in the context of patient care.

In addition, she has devoted many years to developing innovative clinical information systems that have been integrated in New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Columbia University Medical Center and Cornell Medical Center. Most recently, Dr. Mendonça was an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Chicago.

Dr. Mendonça is a welcome addition to our clinical informatics program and will begin to develop a program in medical/clinical informatics in both research and training under the NIH-funded Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (ICTR) in which the Department is a core unit and the College of Engineering an ICTR partner.

The Department welcomes Ms. Lakeesha Carmichael (MS in Statistics with Emphasis in Biostatistics from UW-Madison, 2007) and Ms. Chong Zhang (MS in Statistics from the University of Vermont, 2010) as Assistant Researchers.

Lakeesha comes to the Department after three years at Covance in town, conducting statistical data management, programming and analysis for various phase I and pharmacokinetics (PK) studies. She will be working on phase I cancer clinical trials and clinical and translational research in genitourinary (GU) cancers initially under the supervision of Dr. Jens Eickhoff.

Chong comes to the Department having recently finished her MS in Statistics in addition to an MS degree in Physiology. She will be providing consulting and collaborative support to investigators from the Department of Pediatrics and from the Carbone Cancer Center initially under the supervision of Dr. Jens Eickhoff (for Peds) and Professor KyungMann Kim (for cancer research).

Congratulations to Daniel Gianola for receiving two Honorary Doctorates this year. One from Georg-August University, Goettingen Germany and the other from the Facultad de Agronomia, Universidad de la Republica, Montevideo, Uruguay. Read more...

Congratulations to our very own Rick Chappell, for being elected President of the Society for Clinical Trials on May 20, 2010.

Congratulations to Ph.D. student Seungbong Han (advisors Adi Andrei and Kam Tsui) who is a winner of a paper and travel award from the International Society Clinical Biostatistics (Montepellier, France 2010) for the manuscript "Semiparametric modeling of doubly censored data with an application to prostate cancer".

Congratulations to Christina Kendziorski, Associate Professor, Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, who has been appointed to the Genomics, Computational Biology and Technology (GCAT) Study Section, Center for Scientific Review, National Institutes of Health beginning 7/1/10 and ending 6/30/2016.

Members are selected on the basis of demonstrated competence and achievement in their scientific discipline as evidenced by the quality of research accomplishments, publications in scientific journals, and other significant scientific activities, achievements and honors. Study sections review grant applications submitted to the NIH, make recommendations on these applications to the appropriate NIH national advisory council or board and survey the status of research in their fields of science.

September 1st, 2010 - It is a great pleasure to announce that Paul J. Rathouz, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Health Studies at the University of Chicago, has accepted our offer to become the next Chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics. We anticipate that Paul will join us this coming Fall.

Dr. Rathouz received his B.A. in mathematics at Rice University, his M.S. in Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and his Ph.D. in Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University. After completing his doctoral degree, he joined the faculty at the University of Chicago, where he quickly emerged as both an academic and administrative leader.

He is the Director of the Department of Health Studies Ph.D. Degree program, has served on several NIH study sections primarily in biostatistics methodology and mental health epidemiology, is currently engaged in five NIH funded research projects, is Associate Editor of Biometrics, and has served on the elected governing board for the Eastern North America Region (ENAR) of the International Biometric Society.

His honors include the James E. Grizzle Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Department of Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the ENAR Van Ryzin Award for best student paper. He has published more than 65 peer reviewed papers.

Reminder...just a few days left before the Department of Statistics' 50th Anniversary Conference takes place this week.

"Statistical Science-Making A Difference", 50th Anniversary Conference

View and Print the Conference Program Guide.
Date of Conference: June 3rd & 4th, 2010.