University of Wisconsin, Madison, Biostatistics & Medical Informatics

The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health houses the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics.
Our department faculty and staff conduct research in statistical methodology and computational methods for a variety of biomedical problems, collaborate in the design, conduct, and analyses of laboratory, clinical, and epidemiologic studies and clinical trials, and participate in several graduate and postdoctoral training programs. Additionally, department faculty and staff collaborate in the design, conduct, and analyses of laboratory, clinical, and epidemiologic studies and clinical trials in a variety of biomedical disciplines.
The Department of Biostatistics & Medical Informatics is organized into three research and training programs: Biostatistics, Clinical Trials, and Medical Informatics. In addition, the Biomedical Computing Group (BCG) provides computer support for the Department and other research groups. Many of our faculty members have joint appointments with other schools and departments including Statistics, Computer Sciences, Preventive Medicine, Nursing, Business, Educational Sciences, and Animal Sciences.

Announcements

A CONFERENCE TO CELEBRATE THREE DECADES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON FOR PROFESSOR DAVID L. DEMETS
This conference will celebrate and honor the achievements of David L. DeMets, PhD, Max Halperin Professor of Biostatistics and Chair Emeritus of the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics. He has made substantial contributions in clinical biostatistics and clinical trials methodology, in building the biostatistics program including statistical genetics/genomics, and in developing the medical informatics program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The conference will feature invited speakers who have collaborated with Professor DeMets during his career and former faculty members and students influenced by Professor DeMets. The conference will be May 31-June 1, 2012 on the UW campus at the Health Sciences Learning Center with a conference dinner the evening of May 31. For further information, please contact Sue Parman at 608-263-1706 or Email: . You may also visit the conference website at www.biostat.wisc.edu/DLD_conf.htm for detailed information as it becomes available.

Department News

Yunzhi Lin, PhD student advised by Rick Chappell, has won the 2012 American Statistical Association's Statistical Computing and Graphics Section student travel award. Yunzhi will present her material on selecting cancer staging systems at the Joint Statistical Meetings this summer in San Diego, with registration and travel paid for by the ASA.

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Sushmita Roy will join the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics and the Systems Biology theme group at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery starting January 2012. She will also have a zero-percent appointment in Computer Sciences.
Dr. Roy trained in computer science, and is completing a post-doctoral fellowship at Broad Institute (MIT/Harvard) in Boston. Sushmita will contribute to campus efforts in computational systems biology, aiming to use high-throughput sequencing and other data to infer the structure and function of regulatory networks within the living cell. This work will advance our basic understanding of how cells respond to environmental changes, as well as how they grow and develop into complex multi-cellular organisms. By comparing genomes of different species, Dr. Roy will also gain insights in the evolutionary mechanisms of these networks and their organisms. On a more practical frontier, understanding how such networks function or malfunction will shed light on disease mechanisms, which may lead to new treatments.

*We are pleased to welcome to our department the following two new personnel:*
Menggang Yu, PhD, will be joining our Department as Associate Professor in biostatistics around January 1, 2012. During his first few years here, he will transition to the leadership of the Biostatistics Shared Resource for the University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center (after many stellar years of leadership by KyungMann Kim). He will continue to pursue his research programs in biostatistical methodology especially as it relates to cancer and in collaborative research in cancer clinical trials. Menggang did his PhD in Biostatistics at the University of Michigan and has since had a growing career at Indiana University in Indianapolis.

Qianqian Zhao, MS, will be joining our Department as a Researcher in biostatistics around January 1, 2012. She will fill critical needs in biostatistical support in our work with the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research and in other collaborative areas. Qianqian completed her MS in Statistics at Bowling Green State University and completed additional courses in Biostatistics at the University of Michigan. She has experience in a wide range of applications, including clinical trials, cancer behavioral studies, genetics and genomics, and population-based health surveys.

*Congratulations* to Eneida Mendonca who was recently re-elected to the Board of Directors of the American Medical Informatics Association. AMIA is the nation's leading professional and scientific society for biomedical informatics. Eneida's continuing term of office will begin in January, 2012 and run through 2014.

*Congratulations* to David Page who was recently awarded two NIH R01 grants. One is entitled "Machine Learning for Identifying Adverse Drug Events (ADEs)", which is addressing the need for new methods for both identifying previously un-anticipated ADEs and predicting occurrences of known ADEs. His second project, "Secure Sharing of Clinical History and Genetic Data: Empowering Predictive Personalized Medicine" is developing an integrated approach to secure sharing of clinical and genetic data.