Biostat E-News
Summer 2005

Bruce Weir to succeed Tom Fleming as Biostat Chair in 2006
The Department of Biostatistics is happy to announce the appointment of Dr. Bruce Weir as our next department chairman, effective January 3, 2006. Following a national search, Weir, currently the William Neal Reynolds Professor of Statistics and Genetics and Director of the Bioinformatics Research Center at North Carolina State, has been hired to succeed Chairman Thomas Fleming, whose distinguished 13-year term ends at the beginning of next year. Weir’s appointment as Professor and Chair in the Department of Biostatistics, with an adjunct appointment in Genome Sciences, is scheduled to be sanctioned by the Board of Regents in September.

"We are truly fortunate to have successfully recruited Bruce Weir to serve as Department Chair beginning in 2006," said Tom. "It is exciting to think about what lies ahead, when we will be combining Bruce's remarkable experience, leadership and vision with the impressive strengths of our outstanding faculty, students and staff." When Tom’s term as chair ends next year, he will continue as tenured professor in the department and as director of the Statistical Center for HIV/AIDS Prevention Trial Network. He plans to teach his popular clinical trials class next year.

Bruce Weir has been praised as a strong leader, a visionary researcher and a preeminent educator of genomic scientists. While at North Carolina, he established the graduate program in bioinformatics, the Summer Institute in Statistical Genetics, the C. Clark Cockerham lecture series, and the Bioinformatics Research Center. Bruce earned his Ph.D. in statistics with a minor in genetics at NC State in 1968 and has been on the faculty since 1976. In 2003, he received the O. Max Gardner Award, North Carolina State’s highest faculty honor. His research focuses on statistical genetics. He is also the Director of the Bioinformatics Research Center and has testified as a prosecution DNA expert in many high-profile trials, including CA v. Simpson.


Longini and Halloran accept Faculty Positions
UW Biostatistics will welcome Drs. Ira Longini and Elizabeth Halloran to the faculty in January 2006. Both will serve as UW professors of biostatistics, and will hold primary appointments at SCHARP and the HIV Vaccine Trials Network at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC). The two longtime professional colleagues have a history of productive collaboration as faculty at Emory University on problems in infectious disease, including HIV, influenza and malaria. They have been particularly interested in problems involving vaccine development and evaluation and represent key initial recruitments in the development of a UW/FHCRC collaboration to form a Seattle Vaccine and Immunization Research Center.

Ira Longini (pictured left) is currently a biostatistics professor at Emory University, where he has been since 1984. Before that, he taught at the Universidad del Valle, Cali, Colombia and the University of Michigan. He also spent a number of years working at the International Center for Medical Research, Cali, and various international research institutions including those in Latin America and Bangladesh. Ira’s research interests are in the area of stochastic processes applied to epidemiological problems. He has worked on the analysis of numerous epidemics, on statistical models for the control of a possible bioterrorist attack with an infectious agent (small pox), and other natural infectious disease threats such as pandemic influenza and SARS. He has also worked extensively in the design, analysis and interpretation of vaccine trials.

Elizabeth "Betz" Halloran (hiking in the Grand Canyon, left) is also currently a biostat professor at Emory. While studying physics at the University of Oregon, Halloran became interested in genetics. She was a graduate student at the Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in West Berlin and then studied medicine at the Freie Universitaet Berlin, thinking of being a physician in a developing country. While doing an M.P.H. in Tropical Public Health at Harvard, she rediscovered mathematics and computation through the mathematical modeling of malaria and became interested in study design, causal inference, and statistical methods for dependent happenings. She then earned a D.Sc. in Population Sciences from Harvard. Betz has been at Emory since`89, and is currently director of the Center for Highthroughput Experimental Design and Analysis (CHEDA) and director of the Center for AIDS Research, Biostatistics Core. Her primary focus is in statistical methods for infectious disease studies as well as foundations of inference and causal inference.


Alumni Reception at JSM, August 8
Event: UW Department of Biostatistics Alumni Reception at JSM
Date: Monday, August 8, 2005
Time: 6:30-8:00 p.m.
Place: Hyatt Regency - Lake Minnetonka

Come share some refreshments and catch up with fellow alums at the 2005 Joint Statistical Meetings in Minneapolis! A UW Biostat alumni reception will be held the evening of Monday, August 8, from 6:30 - 8:00 p.m. at the Hyatt Regency in Lake Minnetonka. Professors Norm Breslow and Andrew Zhou will give an important department update. Professor Xihong Lin will talk about next year’s Breslow Lectureship, and we also hope that future chair Bruce Weir will be able to attend and make a few comments. Everyone who attends the reception will receive a free UW Biostat T-shirt.

Please R.S.V.P to Dr. Zhou’s assistant, Laura Rabuck. Thanks!


FACULTY RESEARCH PROFILES

Professor X. H. Andrew Zhou: New methods for health services and medical test studies
Professor X. H. Andrew Zhou is the director of the Biostatistics Unit at Seattle’s Veteran’s Administration Medical Center. His NIH R01 grant proposal, "Statistical Methods in Diagnostic Medicine," was recently approved for funding. His research work has focused primarily on the development of new statistical methods for studies of health services and diagnostic medical tests. A third key research area includes the development of new statistical methods for the analysis of encouragement designs. Andrew has published 64 papers in refereed journals, including those in press. In 40 of these 64 publications, he is first author; in eight, he serves as senior author. To learn more about his research, visit his personal Web page.

Five of his papers have been published in statistical journals just this year:
-Zhou XH, Qin S. Improved confidence intervals for the sensitivity at a fixed level of specificity of a continuous-scale diagnostic test. Stat Med 2005; 465-477.
-Zhou XH, Qin GS. A new confidence interval for the difference between two binomial proportions of paired data. Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference 2005; 128: 527-542.
-Zhou XH and Dihn P. Nonparametric confidence intervals for one and two-sample problems. Biostatistics 2005; 6: 187-200.
-Song X. and Zhou XH. A marginal model approach for analysis of multi-reader multi-test receiver operating characteristic (ROC) data. Biostatistics 2005; 6:303-312.
-Zhou XH, Castelluccio P and Zhou C. Non-parametric estimation of ROC curves in the absence of a gold standard. Biometrics, 61: 600-609.


Professor Norm Breslow: Late effects of treatment for Wilms Tumor
This study reviews the late effects of treatment in survivors of Wilms tumor (WT), a rare, childhood kidney tumor. End stage renal disease (ESRD), ascertained via record linkage between the National Wilms Tumor Study and the United States Renal Data System, was found to be remarkably uncommon. For survivors who had a single cancerous kidney, which was usually removed as part of treatment, the cumulative incidence of ESRD at 20 years after diagnosis of Wilms tumor (WT) was under 1%. It was about 12% for those who had cancer in both kidneys, with most ESRD in these patients being caused by surgical removal of both cancerous kidneys. For a small fraction of patients with congenital anomalies or syndromes suggesting that their WT was caused by mutation or deletion of the WT1 gene, however, the rates of ESRD were much higher.

The results of Norm Breslow’s Late Effects study will greatly reassure most WT survivors and their families. Patients whose disease occurred in conjunction with one of the WT1 syndromes, however, should be screened indefinitely to facilitate prospective management of impaired renal function. These results were presented in October, 2003 at the 35th Congress of the International Society of Paediatric Oncology in Cairo, Egypt and in June, 2004 at the 8th International Conference for Long-Term Complications of Treatment of Children and Adolescents for Cancer in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. They will be published in November, 2005 in the Journal of Urology. Related work was published in Cancer Research (2000) and the Journal of Clinical Oncology (2003).

For more info on Norm’s WT research, visit his personal Web page. The following articles are available via PubMed links:

-Breslow NE, Takashima JR, Ritchey ML, Strong LC, Green DM: Renal failure in the Denys-Drash and Wilms tumor-aniridia syndromes. Cancer Res 60:4030-2, 2000
-Breslow NE, Norris R, Norkool PA, Kang T, Beckwith JB, Perlman EJ, Ritchey ML, Green DM, Nichols KE: Characteristics and outcomes of children with the Wilms tumor-aniridia syndrome: A report from the National Wilms Tumor Study Group. J. Clin. Oncol. 21:4579-85, 2003.


STUDENT AWARDS
++Holly Janes (Pepe Ph.D. advisee) won the SPHCM Gilbert S. Omenn Graduate Student Award for Academic Excellence, the first ever Biostatistics student to be so honored. Holly has accepted a post-doctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore starting this fall. ++Andy Bogart (Heagerty M.S. advisee) won the school's 2005 Outstanding Teaching Assistant award. ++Rob Igo (Wijsman M.S. advisee) won the school's 2005 Outstanding Student award in the Department of Biostatistics. ++Bryan Shepherd (Gilbert Ph.D. advisee) won the department's Senior Student Award. Bryan accepted a faculty position at Vanderbilt University and will begin his tenure there this fall. ++Rebecca Hubbard (Pepe Ph.D. advisee) won the department’s 2004 Donovan J. Thompson award ++ Congratulations to Holly, Andy, Rob, Bryan and Rebecca!


RECENT GRADUATES
++Bryan Goldman (M.S. 2005, Lianne Sheppard advisee) is currently employed as a Statistical Research Associate at the Southwest Oncology Group [SWOG] in Public Health Sciences at the FHCRC. ++Rich Jensen (M.S. 2005, Norm Breslow advisee) is going on to the Ph.D. program in epidemiology at UW.


PAST GRADS AND CURRENT FACULTY AND STAFF
++ Professor Peter Gilbert (Ph.D. 1996, Self) won the first Prentice Professorship in honor of Ross Prentice, professor and former director of Public Health Sciences at the FHCRC. Peter and his wife, Kristi Gilbert, have a new baby daughter, Eleanora, who was born on 25 April 2005. ++ Professor and Chair Thomas Fleming was honored at the department's spring potluck for his 13 year tenure as chair of the department of Biostatistics. ++ Professor Gerald van Belle was recently honored for his service as chair of Environmental Health and professor of Biostatistics. Gerald recently retired from the UW after 30+ years of distinguished service. ++ Ellie Schweihs won the Department of Biostatistics Staff Service Award for 2004-05. Ellie is currently our fiscal unit supervisor and has worked for the department, in administration and at the CHS coordinating center, for almost 17 years. Ellie was honored at the school’s 2005 Graduation Celebration and Awards Ceremony on 10 June 2005.


UPCOMING EVENTS
++ An SPHCM reception will be held in New Orleans on Monday, November 7, 2005, 6:30-8:00 p.m., at the Wyndham Hotel-Imperial Room, during the 2005 APHA meeting.
++ The Third Seattle Symposium in Biostatistics: Statistical Genetics and Genomics, will be held at the Sheraton Seattle Hotel and Towers in Seattle November 21-22, 2005. The symposium will be preceded by short courses in microarray analysis and modern population genetics on Saturday, November 19 and Sunday, November 20. For more details, please click here.
++ The Summer Institute in Statistical Genetics, organized by Bruce Weir, will be held in June 2006. Look for updates on the website and in the winter issue of E-News.
++ The first Norman E. Breslow Distinguished Lectureship will be held August 4, 2006 (note the year) in Seattle on the UW campus. The day-long conference will include presentations from Alastair Scott, David Clayton, Ray Carroll, Jon Wellner, Mitch Gail, Louise Ryan, Brad Efron, Dan D'Angio, Ross Prentice and the awardee of the Breslow Lectureship (TBA). Detailed info will be posted on the website and in the Biostat E-News closer to the event.


MILESTONES
Congratulations to Rance Arnold and Katie Gower Arnold (M.S. 2001- Pauler), pictured left, who were married on April 16, 2005 in San Jose, CA. Alum Carolyn Noonan (M.S. 2001- Yanez) and her family attended the wedding (Carolyn and Katie were in the same graduating class).

Congratulations to Associate Professor David Yanez and his wife, Miriam, whose new son, Malcolm Matteo Yanez, was born on March 15, 2005. Malcolm came into the world at 9:13 a.m., weighed 7lbs 13 oz, and was 20.5 in. long.

Kudos to the joint Biostatistics-Statistics student softball and ultimate teams, who were crowned intramural champions for the second straight year. Way to play, teams!


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

Name: Lillian Lin
Picture: Lillian (center) and her step daughter, Yolanda Crawford, teach her granddaughter, Mya Crawford, to count using sugar packets.
Biostat Degree/Year: Ph.D., 1990 (Fisher)
Current Job/Employer: I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University for six years. In 1996, I took a job at CDC in the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention in the Statistics Section. Back a couple of years ago I joined the ranks of UW graduates who head statistics groups and took over as head of the statistics team here when John Karon retired. I have been surprised at how much I enjoy management. The group here supports most of the heavy statistical work for the Division, which ranges from analyzing data from animal models for HIV vaccine evaluation to surveillance of populations at high risk for HIV (How would you construct a representative sample of injecting drug users?) to clinical trials of medical therapies and behavioral interventions to the ever elusive "how many new HIV infections in the US per year?" Come catch our two topic contributed sessions in Minneapolis!
Favorite websites: www.weather.com, www.imdb.com
Hobby: Book clubs - I belong to two - a science fiction (we don’t just read books and we don’t just do fiction) and a women’s book club.
Research interests: Group randomized studies, surveying hard to survey populations (e.g., injecting drug users, sexual minorities).
Interesting biostat publication: Editor in Chief of a special issue of Statistics in Medicine, 22 (9), March 2003.
Personal milestones: Since leaving UW in 1990 for Atlanta, more or less in sequential order: My former husband Luc Watelet (Ph.D., 1989) and I split up. Luc now lives in Rochester, and we've both married again. I married Alan Crawford, an environmental health officer at the Agency for Toxic Substances and Diseases Registry and a Montana native. I acquired three grown children and four grandchildren this way.
Favorite reminiscence about UW days: The first day in the year Drumheller Fountain is turned on. Eating blackberries on the Burke Gillman Trail.
Fellow alumni are welcome to contact me at: LLIN@CDC.GOV


Name: Mark C. Andersen
Biostat Degree/Year: M.S., 1987 (Gallucci)
Current Job/Employer: Associate Professor, Department of Fishery and Wildlife Sciences, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces
Favorite books/movies: The Harry Potter series, The Lord of the Rings, anything by Gene Wolfe or Tim Powers
Favorite websites: Major League Baseball, Elephant Talk, Earthcam Network
Hobby: Playing keyboards in a classic-rock band. I also enjoy hiking and camping.
Research interests: Ecology and conservation of desert vertebrates, spatially-explicit stochastic simulation models of populations in their landscape context, applications of the risk assessment paradigm in environmental decision-making and policy.
Interesting biostat publications: Here are a couple of good bedtime stories:
Andersen, M.C. 2004. Population dynamics in spatially and temporally variable habitats. pp. 84-93 in "Landscape ecology and wildlife habitat evaluation: Critical information for ecological risk assessment, land-use management activities, and biodiversity enhancement practices," L.A. Kapustka, H. Galbraith, M. Luxon, and G.R. Biddinger, editors. ASTM STP 1458. ASTM International, West Consohocken PA.
Andersen, M.C., H. Adams, B. Hope, M. Powell. 2004. Risk assessment for invasive species. Risk Analysis 24(4): 787-794.
Andersen, M.C., B.C. Thompson, and K.G. Boykin. 2004. Spatial risk assessment across large landscapes with varied land use: Lessons from a conservation assessment of military lands. Risk Analysis 24(5): 1231-1242.
Andersen, M.C., B.J. Martin, and G.W. Roemer. 2004. Use of matrix population models to estimate the efficacy of euthanasia versus trap-neuter-return for management of free-roaming cats. Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 225(12): 1871-1876.
Andersen, M.C. Potential applications of population viability analysis to risk assessment for invasive species. In press, Human and Ecological Risk Assessment.
Current research: I’ve got graduate students working on projects dealing with use of Gap Analysis data for testing biogeographic theory and on kit fox ecology and behavior. I have ongoing projects on the ecology of prairie dogs in the desert Southwest. I’m also pursuing theoretical studies of two kinds of population models: coupled map lattices in variable environments, and multiregional models for stream fish populations.
Personal milestones: My wife and I recently celebrated our 25th anniversary.
Favorite reminiscence about UW days: Interacting with my advisors and fellow students in both the Biostat and Zoology programs.
Fellow alumni are welcome to contact me at: manderse@nnmsu.edu


Name: Steve Millard
Biostat Degree/Year: Ph.D., 1985 (Guttorp)
Current Job/Employer: Manager, Statistical Analysis Unit, Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Therapeutics Development Network Coordinating Center, Children’s Hospital Regional Medical Center, Seattle. Nicole Hamblett (Ph.D. 1999 - Self) and I run the SAU.
Favorite books/movies: Books = Deception Point (Dan Brown), Your Erroneous Zones (Wayne Dyer); Movie = The Red Violin
Favorite websites: www.swimmersguide.com - A list of swimming pools (and health clubs with swimming pools) you can actually swim in. I use this web site to figure out what hotel I’ll stay at when I travel.
Hobby/Second Career: I love to exercise (I swim, run, lift weights, and/or play soccer everyday). I have been taking piano lessons for the last 4 years and now can play some Bach, Chopin, and Mozart. I am also a songwriter (check out www.stevemillardmusic.com).
Research interests: Design of clinical trials; environmental statistics (check out www.probstatinfo.com).
Interesting biostat publication: Applied Statistics in the Pharmaceutical Industry with Case Studies Using S-Plus (Springer-Verlag). After teaching a course in S-Plus to industry statisticians, I hated to see all the work I did on the course notes go to waste, so I edited a book. Warning to wannabe authors: be prepared to give up a couple years of your life.
Current research: Statistical methods for dealing with multiple endpoints in clinical trials.
Personal milestones: I married Stacy Selke in 1981 (Stacy is also a CHRMC employee and a database manager for clinical studies). Our son Chris was born in 1989 and is now almost 16. He officially toasted me in the 50-yd dash on January 19, 2004 and I have since been dubbed the "slow old man." I spent several years of my life writing both an add-in module for S-Plus and a textbook on environmental statistics (supported in part by a grant from my wife). I wrote songs for and produced a jazz CD last year that got some air time on our local jazz radio station KPLU.
Favorite reminiscence about UW days: You expect me to remember that far back? Spending every night of the second year on the phone with Desmond Thompson trying to figure out how to do the 580’s homework. Watching Norm Breslow take a crumpled piece of paper out of his side sport coat pocket, open it up, and retrieve a fresh piece of chalk (this is long before the days of white boards) before putting something else up on the board that stretched my brain beyond its capacity. David Grier’s group readings of Oscar Wilde plays. Playing intramural and co-rec soccer with Ron Thomas, Peter Guttorp, Peter’s wife June Morita, Jim Hughes, Paul Sampson, Steve Hubert, and Keith Knight.
Fellow alumni are welcome to contact me at: smillard@stevemillardmusic.com
Other comments: Communication is the response you get.

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