2019 SAMSI Professional Development Workshop Series November 13, 2019

SPEAKER BIOS

Marie Davidian is the J. Stuart Hunter Distinguished Professor of Statistics at North Carolina State University (NC State) and Adjunct Professor of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at Duke University. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. Marie has served as chair of grant review panels for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including the Biostatistical Methods and Research Design (BMRD) study section that reviews a large portion of the statistical methods grants submitted to NIH; as Coordinating and Executive Editor of the journal Biometrics; as a member of US Food and Drug Administration Advisory Committees; and as president of the American Statistical Association (2013) and of the Eastern North American Region of the International Biometric Society (IBS) (2004). Marie’s research interests include and causal inference and dynamic treatment regimes, design and analysis clinical trials and observational studies, statistical inference in the presence of missing or mismeasured data, and analysis of longitudinal data. She has had statistical methods grants from NIH since 1996, and is currently a Principal Investigator for a P01 Program Project grant, “Statistical Method for Cancer Clinical Trials,” awarded by the National Cancer Institute to a consortium of NC State, Duke, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From 2004-2019 she was Program Director of the NC State-Duke Summer Institute in Biostatistics (SIBS) program, supported by a series of grants from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) to encourage US undergraduates to pursue graduate training in biostatistics; and since 2006 she has been Program Director for a T32 predoctoral training grant from NHLBI, which supports PhD students at NC State and Duke. Marie received the 2007 Janet L. Norwood Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Woman in the Statistical Sciences; the 2009 George W. Snedecor Award for development of statistical theory in biometry and the 2011 F.N. David Award to a female statistician who serves as a role model to other women by her contributions to the profession, both presented by the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies; the 2018 ASA Founders Award; 2018 Honorary IBS Lifetime Membership; and the 2010 NCSU Alexander Quarles Holladay Medal for Excellence, the highest honor the University bestows on a faculty member.

M. Gregory (Greg) Forest is the Grant Dahlstrom Distinguished Professor of Mathematics, with joint appointments in Biomedical Engineering and Applied Physical Sciences, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Greg is the Director of the Carolina Center for Interdisciplinary Applied Mathematics (CCIAM), and has been a SIAM Fellow since 2012. Greg was recruited to UNC to build an applied mathematics program that was integrated into the campus, building collaborations in teaching, training, and in research. Forest’s funding over his career has spanned the NSF Divisions of Mathematical Sciences, Engineering, and Materials Research, the Department of Energy, the Army Research Office, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, NASA, the National Institutes of Health, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and several private consulting contracts. The research associated with these grants is as diverse as the funding agencies, with single investigator grants early in the career, that slowly but surely transitioned to multi-investigator grants. Today, there are many opportunities for funding of one’s individual research focus, and for collaborative proposals. In my career, I sought out collaborations where there was a clear need for the tools and techniques of applied and computational mathematics. Since coming to UNC and engaging heavily with collaborators in Biology, Physics, Pharmacy, Medicine, Biomedical Engineering, and the Social and Behavioral Sciences, the collaborations have expanded to include colleagues in statistics, biostatistics, probability and stochastic processes, and computer science.

Alan F. Karr is Principal of AFK Analytics, LLC. He also holds an adjunct faculty appointment in biostatistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Previously, he was Director of the Center of Excellence for Complex Data Analysis (CoDA) and Director of Business Development for the Division of Statistical and Data Sciences at RTI International; Director of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences, Professor of Statistics & Operations Research and Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and a founding Associate Director of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute. Prior to moving to North Carolina, he was a tenured faculty member and associate dean at Johns Hopkins University. He received a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Northwestern University. Karr’s research centers on cross-disciplinary and cross-sector collaborations involving statistics and such other fields as data confidentiality, data integration (including record linkage and model-based methods), data quality, data availability, survey methodology, education statistics, healthcare, transportation, aging, the scientific workforce, software engineering, disease surveillance, and materials science. He holds one patent; is the author of three books and more than 150 scientific papers, of which the majority have co- authors from disciplines other than statistics. Karr is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics; as well as an elected member of the International Statistical Institute and the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars.

Alexander Volfovsky is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistical Science and the Co-Director of the Polarization Lab at Duke. He joined the department after finishing a NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Statistics Department at Harvard University. Prior to that, Alex completed his PhD in statistics at the University of Washington in Seattle and a joint Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Master’s degree in Statistics from the University of Chicago. His research concentrates on developing theory and methodological tools for computational social science applications, with particular interests in high dimensional data, causal inference and network analysis. With collaborators at Duke he has developed novel tools for community detection, for extracting causal signals from high dimensional observational data and for new approaches to implementing and analyzing network experiments.