Conference on Statistical Methods in Epidemiology and Observational Studies

In Honor of Norman E. Breslow


August 4, 2006
Seattle, Washington, USA

Biography

Dr. Mitchell H. Gail received an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1968 and a Ph.D. in statistics from George Washington University in 1977. He joined NCI in 1969 and became Chief of the Biostatistics Branch in 1994. Dr. Gail is a Fellow (1983) and former President of the American Statistical Association (1995), a former President (1988) of the Eastern North American Region of the International Biometrics Society (ENAR), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1995), an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (1983), and an elected member of the Institute of Medicine (1996). He received the Spiegelman Gold Medal for Health Statistics(1979), the Snedecor Award for applied statistical research (1986, 1990), the Howard Temin Award for AIDS Research (1993), the National Institutes of Health Director's Award (1994), and the Distinguished Service Medal (1996) from the United States Public Health Service.

Dr. Gail has made important methodologic and substantive contributions in several areas, including: characterizing the motility of cells in tissue culture; evaluating diagnostic tests and serial markers; designing and analyzing clinical trials and epidemiologic studies; AIDS research, including the method of back-calculation to estimate HIV infections and project AIDS incidence (with Ronald Brookmeyer); and development of absolute risk models, including the widely used "Gail model" to project breast cancer risk. He is co-author, with Ronald Brookmeyer of AIDS Epidemiology: A Quantitative Approach (Oxford, 1994), and Co-editor, with Jacques Benichou, of the Encyclopedia of Epidemiologic Methods (Wiley, 2000).

To view Mitch's webpage, please click here.

To learn more about the Breslow Lectureship, click here.