Biostat E-News
Winter 2006

Bruce Weir assumes Biostat Chairmanship
Dr. Bruce Weir assumed his appointment as Professor and Chair of the UW Department of Biostatistics at the first of the year. Since arriving, Bruce has been busy familiarizing himself with the Department faculty, staff and students. "The great collegiality I noticed on my visits last year has proven to be even stronger than I thought. It is wonderful to be part of such a strong and supportive department" he said. "There have already been many occasions where I have been impressed at how willing people have been to work in ways that help us all." Bruce enjoys talking informally to department members at 10 a.m. coffee each morning in the F-wing conference room, and he has benefited from the discussions at the February 1 Faculty Retreat and the March 1 staff meeting. He hopes the first will be an annual event, and the second a monthly one.

Bruce Weir comes to UW from North Carolina State University, where he received his Ph.D. in statistics. He was on the faculty in the Department of Statistics there and was William Neal Reynolds Professor of Statistics and Genetics. For the past five years he served as Director of the Bioinformatics Research Center and Coordinator of the Bioinformatics Graduate Program. Our former chair, Dr. Tom Fleming, stepped down after 13 distinguished years at the helm, and he continues as tenured Professor and as Director of the Statistical Center for the HIV/AIDS Prevention trial Network at the Hutch. Tom will be teaching his popular clinical trials course BIOST 524 in the Spring.

Bruce Weir describes himself as a statistical geneticist and he is enjoying the great strengths in this area at UW. He hopes to direct students and teach in the statistical genetics track. He has brought the very successful Summer Institute in Statistical Genetics to UW, and he has been able to persuade department faculty Bill Barlow, Jim Hughes, Lurdes Inoue, Katie Kerr and David Yanez to join the Institute teaching team. They will join John Storey and Elizabeth Thompson who have participated in past years. Other UW faculty involved are Josh Akey and Joe Felsenstein from Genome Sciences and Matthew Stephens from Statistics. Bruce says that his hobby is forensic statistics, although that takes less of his time now than it did during his involvement with the O.J. Simpson criminal and civil trials. He does hope to continue offering his online course in statistical methods for DNA profiles to forensic scientists from around the world.


11th Annual Summer Institute in Statistical Genetics, June 12-30
The Department of Biostatistics is proud to announce that the Summer Institute in Statistical Genetics has moved to UW this year, following its director, Professor and Chair Bruce Weir. The Institute, June 12-30, is a series of workshops designed to introduce geneticists to modern methods of statistical analysis and to introduce statisticians to statistical problems arising in modern genetics. Each workshop is two and half days. Limited tuition and/or travel scholarships are available for students and postdocs. For information on registration, modules, accommodations and scholarships, please click here.

The modular nature of the Institute lets participants design a program suited to their backgrounds and interests, usually signing up for two or three modules. The Summer Institute will also offer a number of modules at the University of Aarhus in Aarhus, Denmark, on July 24-28.

A one-day Seattle Showcase Symposium in Statistical Genetics will be held on Saturday, June 24, in conjunction with the Institute. Speakers with recent groundbreaking publications will be selected by the Summer Institute instructors to present their work. (Invited speakers will be announced soon on our website.)


Breslow Conference and Lectureship, August 4
We hope those of you attending JSM will plan to arrive a little early for our summer conference, "Statistical Methods in Epidemiology and Observational Studies: In Honor of Norman E. Breslow," to be held Friday, August 4 at Kane Hall on the UW campus. Alumni are also invited to the conference reception at the UW Club (a.k.a. Faculty Club) the evening of Thursday, August 3. The conference celebrates and honors the seminal scientific contributions of Professor and former Chair Norm Breslow.

The day-long event will also honor the first recipient of the first Norman E. Breslow Distinguished Lectureship Award, Professor Nicholas E. Day, Research Professor of Epidemiology at the Institute of Public Health, Cambridge, who will give the opening presentation. Nick was chosen for his outstanding achievements in developing and implementing new quantitative methods in epidemiology.

The conference will feature individual presentations and panel discussions by a group of world class researchers in statistical issues in epidemiology and observational studies. Our distinguished panel of speakers include Nicholas Day, University of Cambridge; Giulio J. D'Angio, University of Pennsylvania; Alastair Scott, University of Auckland; David Clayton, Cambridge University; Raymond Carroll, Texas A&M University; Jon Wellner, University of Washington; Mitchell Gail, National Cancer Institute; Louise Ryan, Harvard University; Ross L. Prentice, University of Washington; Niels Keiding, University of Copenhagen; Juni Palmgren, Karolinska Institutet; and Duncan Thomas, University of Southern California. A conference poster session will be held during the reception; please visit the Conference poster submission link to learn more.

If you would like to donate to the newly established Breslow lectureship endowment, please click here.


2006 JSM in Seattle, August 6-10
We'll be happy to see many of you in Seattle this summer at the Joint Statistical Meetings , August 6-10. UW Biostat will be holding a reception on Tuesday night, August 8, so please save the date! We'll announce the time and more specifics closer to the JSM. For more info, please contact Professor Andrew Zhou.

Biostat alum Lillian Lin (Ph.D. 1990) of the CDC and Janice Derr at the FDA have organized an invited session for JSM on statistical consulting. The session will be chaired by Chris Gullion at Kaiser Permanente; other participants include Scott Clark of Eli Lilley, Janet Powell (UW Division of Occupational Therapy) and Kevin Cain (UW Biostatistics and Nursing Research). Lillian hopes to see many of you at her session.


Faculty Research Profile
Assistant Professor Kathleen Kerr (pictured with son Alex) joined the Department of Biostatistics in 2001 after completing a post-doc at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. Katie's primary area of research is statistical methods for gene expression microarray experiments, with particular expertise in the design of microarray studies. She collaborates with many scientists at UW who are using microarrays to study human, mouse, plant, and bacterial genomics. She is also the Director of the Bioinformatics and Biostatistics Core at UW's Center for Ecogenetics and Environmental Health.

Here are some of Katie's recent publications:
-Kerr MK: Design considerations for efficient and effective microarray studies, Biometrics 59:822-828, 2003.
-Kerr MK: Linear models for microarray data analysis: Hidden similarities and differences, Journal of Computational Biology 10:891-901, 2003.
-Qin, L-X, Kerr KF, Contributing Members of the Toxicogenomics Research Consortium: Empirical evaluation of data transformations and ranking statistics for microarray analysis. Nucleic Acids Research 32:5471-5479, 2004.
-Contributing Members of The Toxicogenomics Research Consortium: Standardizing Gene Expression between Laboratories and across Platforms. Nature Methods, 2:351-356, 2005.
-Qin, L-X, Beyer, RP, Hudson, FN, Linford, NJ, Morris, DE, Kerr KF: Evaluation of Methods for Affymettrix Array Data via Quantitative Real-Time PCR. BMC Bioinformatics, to appear.


Students Shine at October's Student-Faculty Retreat
Kudos to all of the students who participated in the Student Poster Session at the fall departmental retreat at Friday Harbor. The quality of the presentations and discussions were stellar, clearly reflecting the scholarly effort in both the underlying research and the presentation of the results.

Special congratulations to: Pam Shaw, whose poster on "Methods for Cox regression with non-classical covariate measurement error" was the top vote getter among entering students. Pam is thus the winner of the $500 prize in this category. There was a tie for the most votes received from advanced (second year and beyond) students. Hence the $500 first place prize and $100 second place prize will be combined and split between: Charlotte Gard, who received $300 for her winning poster on "Using censored multinomials for estimating mother to child transmission of HIV", and Grace Ge, who received $300 for her winning poster on "Exploring the genetics of time-varying quantitative traits from longitudinal data." Kyle Rudser's poster on "Error spending for clinical trial designs" earned second place (and the prize of $100) in the balloting by the entering students.

Thanks to all who made the poster session such a success--especially student coordinator Christine Howard and administrator Cynthia Marks for all the logistical arrangements.


SPHCM Alumni Event, April 26
"Perspectives in Public Health," the School's annual alumni event, will be held the evening of April 26, 6-8 p.m., in the HUB East Ballroom at the UW. Admission is free. And this year the event will honor our first Distinguished Alumni Award winner in many years (to be announced).

The evening will include an update on the School from Dean Patricia Wahl and remarks from the award winner. Wine and appetizers will be served prior to the event, with a dessert reception afterwards. Watch the mail for your invitation around the first of March. Questions? Contact Karen Hanson at (206) 685-6699 or klhanson@u.washington.edu.


RECENT GRADUATES
++Andy Bogart (M.S. 2005, Patrick Heagerty advisee) is currently a Research Scientist for General Internal Medicine at the University of Washington. ++Rob Igo (M.S. 2005, Ellen Wijsman advisee) is currently a post doc at Case Western Reserve University. ++Michael Hussey (M.S. 2005, Jim Hughes advisee) is currently a Statistical Research Associate with the Southwest Oncology Group at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. ++Darcy Jennings (M.S. 2005, Nancy Temkin advisee) is currently a Biostatistician and Research Scientist for the Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences Department at the University of Washington. ++Holly Janes (Ph.D. 2005, Margaret Pepe advisee) is currently a post doc at Johns Hopkins University. ++Li-Xuan Qin (Ph.D. 2005, Steve Self advisee) is currently an Assistant Attending Biostatistician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. ++Brian Shepherd (Ph.D. 2005, Peter Gilbert advisee) is currently an Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University.


PAST GRADS AND CURRENT FACULTY AND STAFF
++ Professor Andrew Zhou was recently appointed as an Editor for Health Services and Outcomes Research Methodology, an international journal devoted to quantitative methods for the study of the utilization, quality, cost and outcomes of health care. ++ Kudos to Professor Ross Prentice, professor and former director of Public Health Sciences at the FHCRC, who won the contest for naming the new UW Biostat print newsletter with his creative entry: "Biostatisphere." ++Student Rob Schmicker was nominated for the 2005 UW Excellence in Teaching Award. ++Welcome to Biostatistics' new Student Services Counselor, Renee Albert, formerly of Epidemiology. ++Farewell to former Student Services Counselor, Christine Howard, who has taken a job at the Primate Center, Division of International Programs.


UPCOMING EVENTS
April 26: An SPHCM alumni reception at the University of Washington, 6-8 p.m. in the HUB East Ballroom
June 12-30: The Summer Institute in Statistical Genetics, organized by Institute director Bruce Weir
June 24: The one-day Seattle Showcase Symposium in Statistical Genetics, in conjunction with the Summer Institute
August 3: Breslow conference reception at the UW Club (a.k.a. Faculty Club), 7:00-10:00 p.m.
August 4: The first Norman E. Breslow Distinguished Lectureship will be awarded at the conference, Statistical Methods in Epidemiology and Observational Studies: In Honor of Norman Breslow, at Kane Hall on the UW campus.
August 4: Breslow conference banquet at the UW Club (a.k.a. Faculty Club), 7:00-10:00 p.m.
August 6-10: 2006 JSM in Seattle - "Statistics in an Uncertain World: Meeting Global Challenges," at the Sheraton Seattle Hotel and Towers
August 8: UW Biostat Alumni reception at JSM (evening event), time/locale TBA


MILESTONES
++ Congratulations to Katherine Guthrie (Ph.D., 2001) and her husband David, who welcomed their second child, Lucinda, to their family last June. Katherine is part of the Clinical Statistics group at the FHCRC, where her work mostly involves designing and analyzing clinical studies, as well as retrospective analyses.


ALUMNI PROFILES: IN THEIR OWN WORDS
Former students choose from a list of questions to create their own unique alumni profile.

Name: Bonnie Lind
Biostat Degree/Year: M.S., 1987 (Kronmal)
Current Job/Employer: Director of Research, Idaho Nursing Workforce Center/ Research Asst Prof, Boise State University
Research interests: Nursing workforce (supply and demand issues), quality of care, rural health
Current research: I came back to the UW long enough to finish a Ph.D. in Health Services Research last year, and now I am back in Idaho, just getting started in research about the nursing workforce, nursing shortage, etc. I teach the Intro to Biostat for the Master of Health Sciences Program also. It is a bit scary to be one of only 3 biostatisticians in town--all of us Master's level. Any Ph.D. grads out there looking for a job? Actually one of the things I really like about Idaho is the sense that I can have a positive impact on the state. There are so few people here with research experience that every one of us counts.
Interesting publication: My Ph.D. work looked at how people in Washington use the required insurance benefit that covers complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) providers. A couple of papers have come out of that (Spine, June 2005, and J Alt and Comp Care, coming out in March), but the most interesting one was just recently submitted. It looked at how the inclusion of insurance claims from CAM providers changes the performance of a risk adjustment index.
Favorite book: A couple of recent favorites have been "Blue Like Jazz" (Miller) and "The Kite Runner" (Hosseini).
Favorite Web site: I-Tunes Music Store, and pod casts from NPR. I am a recent I-pod junkie!
Hobby: Mastiff rescue, playing music at the Presbyterian church.
Favorite reminiscence about UW days: "Back in my day…" when the Biostat computer lab consisted of 2 IBM XTs and 1 IBM AT (which really dates me!)I was using one of the XTs and needed to format a floppy disk. This was in 1985, prior to starting any classes, and I had never really used computers very much. Someone told me to just type format and hit enter, which I did, only to see the hard disk light start flashing and realize that I was formatting the hard disk. I will never forget the sinking feeling in my stomach, and thinking that they were going to drum me out of the program before I had taken even one class! So after erasing the hard drive, I went and found Dave Fetrow, who was very gracious about it and let me know that I wasn't the first person to make that mistake. That was only the first of many times I wondered whether I would get through the program, but somehow I did, and it provided the entree into a varied and interesting career.
Fellow alumni are welcome to contact me at: BonnieLind@boisestate.edu.


Name: Jianwen Cai
Photo: Jianwen with her family, (from left to right: husband Haibo, kids Eric, Laura and Christina, and Jianwen)
Biostat Degree/Year: Ph.D. 1992 (Prentice)
Current Job/Employer: Professor and Interim Chair, Department of Biostatistics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Research interests: Multivariate Survival Analysis, Design and Analysis of Clinical Trials, Obesity Research, Cardiovascular Disease Research.
Interesting biostat publications:
Cai, J. and Zeng, D. (2004): Sample size/power calculation for case-cohort studies, Biometrics, 60, 1015-1024.
Schaubel, D.E. and Cai, J. (2004): Regression methods for gap time hazard functions for sequentially ordered multivariate failure time data, Biometrika, 91, 291-303.
Cai, J., Tyroler, H.A., Pajak, A., Li, Y., Shestov, A., Davis, C.E., Rywik, S., Li, Y. and Deev, A. (2004): Total cholesterol and mortality in China, Poland, Russia and the US, Annals of Epidemiology, 14, 399-408.
Cai, J., Fan, J., Li, R., and Zhou, H. (2005): Variable selection for multivariate failure time data, Biometrika, 92, 303-316.
Current research: My research areas include statistical methods for multivariate survival data. I am also involved with projects which examine Asians living in China and whites and blacks living in the United States to compare relationships between BMI, waist circumference, and risk of developing co-morbidities, such as type 2 diabetes, hyperlipideaemias, and hypertension. Another interesting project that I am involved with is a dental study which examines the relation of lesions of endodontic origin and risk of coronary heart disease. I am serving as a General Methodology Chair on the Program Committee for the 2006 Joint Statistical Meetings in Seattle(!). We are currently very busy putting the contributed program together. It is an interesting experience. I am very excited that it is going to be in Seattle! I am currently the interim chair of my department. Our previous chair retired last year. Our new chair is Michael Kosorok (Ph.D. 1991) and he will join us at the end of June. Three other alumni, Haibo Zhou (Ph.D. 1992), David Couper (Ph.D. 1994) and Petra Buzkova (Ph.D. 2004), are also on the faculty in my department.
Personal milestones: After I graduated from UW, I joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Haibo and I now have three children (Laura is 13, Christina is 12, and Eric is 8 years old). They are as active as they can be in the extracurricular activities and we sometimes wonder if we allow them to do too much. It certainly looks that way to Haibo and I since we drive them all the time. Fortunately, Chapel Hill is a small place and we can generally get to those events within a four-mile radius. It is a great joy to watch the kids growing up and doing what they love.
Favorite book: I enjoyed reading Harry Potter to my son Eric at night when he was younger. I remember that when we were close to the end of the book, I would ask him to go to sleep and I would continue to read the book until it was finished.
Favorite web site: www.jstor.org and www.google.com
Hobby: My family likes to travel. We bring our kids to visit China every other year. We visited Hawaii twice on the way to China. This is our year to go again and the kids have been asking about it already. For the years that we do not visit China, we like to tour the country and go to North Carolina beaches and mountains. Last summer Yu Shen (Ph.D., 1994) and her family visited us and we had great fun camping in the Great Smoky Mountains. We also had several other friends visit us last year: Marie Reilly (Ph.D., 1991), all the way from Switzerland, and Lianne Sheppard (Ph.D. 1992), all the way from Seattle. It was really fun to catch up with each other and talk about the Biostat days.
Favorite reminiscence about UW days: I have many wonderful memories about my classmates during my student life at UW. We were a very close group from the start. I came from China, and my classmates had extended their hands to help me and made sure I was welcomed. I still remember the time we spent together to prepare for the qualifying exams. I also have fond memories of making earrings with Sue Rosenkranz (Ph.D. 1992), hiking at Mt. Rainier and biking to the Hutch with Lianne Shepperd, going to downtown to watch the St. Patrick's day parade with Marie Reilly, learning to play softball with Mary Emond (Ph.D. 1993), studying hard with Danni Daniels (M.S., 1990), partying at Nancy and Joe Sothom's (M.S., 1990) home, kicking sacks and practicing juggling with Jamie Myles (Ph.D., 1992), as well as the department's annual parties.
Other comments: UW Biostat is truly a great place and it prepared me well for the challenges in the real world. I am grateful to my dissertation advisor Ross Prentice, my RA advisor Margaret Pepe, and many other professors in the department as well as my fellow classmates. Through its graduates, UW Biostat's way of doing things has traveled far to influence other departments in the country. I am really proud to be an alumnus of Biostat!
Fellow alumni are welcome to contact me at: cai@bios.unc.edu.