UW School of Public Health and Community Medicine Department of Biostatistics
Volume 2, Issue 1
Winter 2007
Norm Breslow, Mitch Gail and Bruce Weir
at Breslow Conference
“ I hope the Depart-
ment will enjoy the
benefits of visits by
other world class lec-
turers in future years.”
“ I will be pleased to
discuss opportunites to
support the department.”
biostatisphere_newsletter_winter1 1
biostatisphere
Conference Kicks Off Breslow Lectureship
The UW department of Biostatis-
tics established the Norman E.
Breslow Distinguished Lecture-
ship, to be awarded annually to
a biostatistical scholar who has
significantly contributed to meth-
odology and applications in the
health sciences.
The Lectureship kicked off this past
summer at the Conference on Sta-
tistical Methods in Epidemiology and
Observational Studies in Seattle, an
event that celebrated the scientific
achievements of Professor Norm
Breslow, former department Chair. The conference,
held in Seattle, showcased the initial lecture, delivered
by Dr. Mitchell Gail, Chief of the Biostatistics Branch
of the National Cancer Institute.
“It was a great pleasure for me to be asked to give a
lecture in Norm Breslow’s honor,” said Gail, pictured
here between Breslow and department chair Bruce
Weir. “He and his colleagues have provided the epi-
demiology and biostatistics community with insights
and tools we use every day—and indeed my lecture
From the Chair
Neither record rains nor cold temperatures have slowed
progress in the UW Biostat department this winter.
Carl Riches, formerly of UW Mathematical Sciences,
will oversee our computer infrastructure, building on
the excellent foundation left by Jim Hogan and Brian
Haney. Ryan Kyle will return to CHSCC in March. Cathy
Greenbaum is our new Assistant to the Chair, replac-
ing Pete Mesling, who is our new Communications
Specialist. We are recruiting faculty for the ROC (see
page 3) and also in the area of statistical genomics.
Scott Emerson has taken over as PI of ROC and Patrick
Heagerty will act as Interim Director of our new Cen-
ter for Biomedical Statistics. Planning for the CBS has
been underway for several years; the hard work of Tom
Fleming, Mary Emond and others seems about to pay
off. We hope the CBS will begin operations on July 1.
Student recruitment was very successful for Autumn
2006 and we have received a record number of ap-
plications for 2007. The student T-wing space will be
renovated this summer: new ceiling, new carpet,
new partitions and furniture and fresh paint. We still
have visions of a new building for the School of Public
Health, just outside the I-wing on NE Pacific Street,
on absolute risk relied on many of those tools. I am
confident that Norm’s wonderful record of accom-
plishment and the warmth and spirit of Norm and his
colleagues will enrich a long succession of Norman E.
Breslow Distinguished Lectures.” The 2007 Breslow
Lecture will be given by Norm’s long-term collaborator
Nick Day, dates TBA.
120 alumni, faculty, and colleagues attended the con-
ference, which featured an all-star line-up of experts,
providing an overview of past, current and prospec-
tive research in the field. “I was extremely impressed
by the enormous effort put into the Breslow Confer-
ence by Tom Fleming and by organizers Xihong Lin,
Thomas Lumley and David Yanez,” said Breslow. “It
was wonderful to hear from many conference partici-
pants during the subsequent Joint Statistical Meet-
ings how much they had enjoyed the event and, in
particular, the outstanding inaugural Breslow Lecture
given by my old friend Mitch Gail. I hope the Depart-
ment will enjoy the benefits of visits by other world
class lecturers in future years.”
If you wish to make a donation to the Breslow Lec-
tureship fund, visit https://secure.gifts.washington.
edu/sphcm/gift.asp?code=breslo&page=make.
but more immediate relief for our space crunch may
come from the new University Tower (formerly the
Safeco Tower) on 45th Street.
Many faculty and students presented their research
at the Department Retreat in October at Islandwood
on Bainbridge Island. The 2007 Retreat is planned
for September 20-21 at Pack Forest at the foot of Mt
Rainier. We look forward to Beth Weir’s storytelling as
part of the student concert. We also look forward to
meeting alumni at our JSM reception in August in Salt
Lake City.
The Department’s endowment portfolio is now in ex-
cess of $2 million, well on the way to our $10 million
goal. These funds are used for student and faculty
support and insulate us from the vagaries of Federal
grant funding. Biostat faculty have embraced a new
UW matching program for faculty, staff and retirees
and have so far pledged $100,000 for new student
fellowships. I will be pleased to discuss this and other
opportunities to support the department in these very
tangible ways. And of course I hope to see you at cof-
fee in the F-wing conference room at 10 a.m. some
day soon.
2/7/2007 8:30:04 PM
 biostatisphere
2 Winter 2007
Tim DeRouen
” The article…is clearly
the most widely dis-
seminated dental re-
search results in recent
history.”
“ I had no choice but
to get a Ph.D. in
Biostatistics.”
Janes and Sheppard
“ …this method has
some tricky issues in-
volved.”
biostatisphere_newsletter_winter2 2
Biostat Faculty Research Profile:
Tim DeRouen and Brian Leroux
Featured Publication: DeRouen TA, Martin MD, Leroux
BG, Townes BD, Woods JS, Leitao J, Castro-Caldas A,
Luis H, Bernardo M, Rosenbaum G, Martins IP: Neu-
robehavioral effects of dental amalgam in children: a
randomized clinical trial. Journal of the American Med-
ical Association, 295(15): 1784-1792, 2006.
Congratulations to Biostat Professors Tim DeRouen
and Brian Leroux, whose recent publication in the
Journal of the American Medical Association (see
citation, above) has caused quite a stir. They have
received international attention for the article, which
published clinical trial results involving the health ef-
fects of dental amalgam in Portuguese children.
The results of the trial did confirm that children who
received amalgam fillings ended up with slightly
higher levels of mercury in their urine, but they did
not perform any worse on the neurobehavioral tests
that constituted the primary endpoints in the ten
year study. Tim DeRouen led the trial, in which re-
searchers examined 507 children, ages 8 to 10, in
Biostat Student Profile: Julian Wolfson
Biostat grad student Julian Wolfson has a public health
legacy to live up to.
“I’ve always joked that I had no choice but to get a
Ph.D. in Biostatistics,” said Wolfson, pictured with
girlfriend April. “How else could I hope to understand
my parents’ dinner table conversation? When your fa-
ther is a professor of biostatistics, and your mother a
professor of epidemiology (both at McGill University),
topics like the nature of sufficiency and complete-
ness, or applications of capture-recapture methodol-
ogy aren’t at all atypical.”
Wolfson is interested in HIV vaccine research and
causal inference. He’s currently working with Peter
Student-Faculty Collaboration:
Air Pollution Methods for Epidemiologists
Featured Publication: Janes H, Sheppard L, Lumley
T. Assessing the Health Effects of Air Pollution Us-
ing the Case-Crossover Design. Epidemiology, 2005,
16:717-26.
Also: Lumley T and Levy D (2000). Bias in the case-
crossover design: implications for studies of air pollu-
tion. Environmetrics, 11: 689-704, 2000.
When Holly Janes (Ph.D., 2005) started at UW Biostat,
she soon connected with Professor Lianne Sheppard, an
expert in the environmental statistics. Sheppard set her
Lisbon, Portugal, and tested them repeatedly over
seven years of follow up to determine whether the
low level mercury exposure from the amalgam fill-
ings had any neurological effects during this critical
growth and development period of children.
Although amalgam has been in use for more than
100 years, it has only recently been found to emit
small amounts of mercury in patients. The study,
which found no adverse health effects of the amal-
gam, runs counter to the claims of some rather vocal
anti-amalgam groups that say that any level of mer-
cury is harmful.
The publication (along with a companion article on a
parallel study conducted in New England) received
widespread coverage nationally (NY Times, Wall
Street Journal, USA Today) and internationally, in-
cluding Russia (Pravda), China, and India. So far, the
article has been cited in over 300 publications, online
and in print, clearly the most widely disseminated
dental research results in recent history.
Gilbert at SCHARP (the Statistical Center for HIV/
AIDS Research and Prevention at the Fred Hutchinson
Cancer Research Center). “We’re exploring a causal-
effects based approach which we hope will help iden-
tify post-vaccination immune responses that are use-
ful predictors of how well a vaccine will protect an
individual,” he said.
Julian’s hobbies include squash and cooking. He
played for the UW intercollegiate squash team during
his first two years in Seattle. His favorite book is The
Code Book by Simon Singh, “a fascinating blow-by-
blow account of the history of code-making and code-
breaking, covering everything from the first coded
messages up to quantum cryptography.”
to work interpreting issues that sprung from a publica-
tion by another Biostat professor, Thomas Lumley. Their
resulting collaboration was published in Epidemiology.
The Lumley Environmetrics article (citation above) dealt
with case-crossover design, one of several study de-
signs that are used to assess the health effects of air
pollution. He and epidemiology graduate student Levy
discovered that the commonly used reference selec-
tion strategies, or implementations of the design, in-
corporated certain types of bias. They recommended
alternative strategies that circumvented the bias.
Continued on pg. 4.
2/7/2007 8:30:06 PM

Biostat Staff Profile: ROC Project Director Judy Powell
Judy Powell is the project director of the NIH-spon-
sored Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium (ROC)
at UW Biostat’s Cardiovascular Clinical Trials Center
(CCTC). Biostat Professor Scott Emerson is the princi-
pal investigator of the Consortium.
“ROC is the first multi-site pre-hospital government
sponsored trial of its kind,” said Powell. “Paramedics
perform interventions and collect the outcomes in the
field. ROC looks at two aspects of emergency care—
traumatic incidents like car accidents, and cardiac ar-
rest patients.”
Powell directs the five-year $50 million trial, coordinat-
ing ten sites—seven in the U.S. and three in Canada—
and a coordinating center staff of twenty, including a
number of Biostat student research assistants.
“Our job is to facilitate, coordinate, and analyze the
data and make things run smoothly with the sites,”
said Powell. “And my job is to try to get a broad picture
of what our center and ROC is doing so that we can
meet the needs of the consortium.”
Biostat Faculty Profile: Professor Alfred Hallstrom
Professor Al Hallstrom, founder of the Cardiovascular
Clinical Trial Center (CCTC), has directed eight multi-
site, randomized clinical trials of new treatments
and therapies for cardiovascular diseases. Hallstrom,
a UW Biostat faculty member for 33 years, is one
of the foremost statisticians in cardiac emergency
medicine research in the world. He has worked with
Medic One since its inception in the seventies, and
has served on the board of the Medic II Foundation
since 1990. Al is pictured with his two grandsons,
Tom and Sam.
How did the CCTC start?
When we started this, there weren’t any clinical trial
practice manuals—we were pioneers. First there
was the Cardiac Arrhythmia Pilot Study (CAPS). Then
NIH funded the full trial, the Cardiac Arrhythmia Sup-
pression Trial (CAST).
CAST had a startling result, which was that the new
generation anti-arrhythmic drugs, so-called miracle
drugs, were killing people—a totally unsuspected re-
sult. So that study is quoted often in statistical litera-
ture because it’s an example of how far off surrogate
endpoints can be.
What is the Center’s greatest accomplishment?
We’ve had many trials where results were contrary
to what everyone had previously believed. AVID (An-
tiarrhythmics Versus Implantable Defibrillator trial)
verified that the devices increase survival, although
the magnitude was infinitely less than what had
been assumed.
When implantable defibrillators went from a simple
shock box to computer driven devices that paced
biostatisphere_newsletter_winter3 3
biostatisphere
Winter 2007 3
After getting her nursing degree at UW, Powell worked
as a nurse at Harborview, then as nurse coordinator
on the Cascade Study.
This led to her work at the CCTC with Biostat Profes-
sor Al Hallstrom on the CAST study. Before coordinat-
ing the ROC, Powell played key roles on the AVID and
PAD trials. She has co-authored 21 publications that
spring mostly from the AVID and PAD studies.
“You have this effort where you’ve been planning your
protocol and the forms and the manuals and training
everybody—to actually see that process unfold and “ Our job is to try to
the study to begin and then come to completion— facilitate, coordinate,
that’s very, very rewarding,” said Powell.
and analyze the data
At home, Powell hangs out with her family--she has and make things run
two boys, Eli and Drew. She aspires to have some smoothly with the
hobbies some day and to occasionally get to the sites.”
gym, but right now, family and work are her reign-
ing passions.
the heart, the DAVID trial studied the new devices.
DAVID was stopped early because the new device
actually worsened survival. That was a stunning re-
sult, because they already comprised 80% of the
implanted devices. So that changed the ICD implant
practice throughout the world.
DAVID 2 is now studying what the problem was with
the bells and whistles device. We’re in the final year
of follow-up.
What’s your greatest personal professional
achievement? Al Hallstrom with grandsons
One is helping to mold this team into a really effec- Tom and Sam
tive, intelligent clinical trials processing unit. The
Center team has conducted some really good stud-
ies, taking a lot of hard work and intellect on our col-
lective parts.
The other is my involvement with Medic One Foun-
dation. Early on, I worked as their statistician. And
because of spending so much time with the data, 25
years ago I formulated the hypothesis that compres- “We’ve had many
sions alone, without ventilations, were the saving
trials where results
factor in CPR.
were contrary to what
18 years ago, I finally talked the city into a random- everyone had previ-
ized telephone CPR trial. When people called 911 ously believed.”
to report a cardiac arrest and didn’t know CPR, the
dispatcher would give them one of two sets of di-
rections—one with alternating ventilations and com-
pressions, one with just compressions.
In the end, the ones who just did chest compres-
sions had 14% survival and the ones doing ventila-
Continued on pg. 4.
2/7/2007 8:30:06 PM
 biostatisphere
4 Winter 2007
BIOSTATisphere is pub-
lished three times per
year by the University of
Washington Department of
Biostatistics, Campus Mail
Stop 357232, Seattle, WA
98195-7232. Please direct
correspondence to the
editor, Elaine Riot (elainer@
u.washington.edu) or to the
chair, Bruce Weir (bsweir@
u.washington.edu).
For general info, please
visit the department Web
site, www.biostat.wash-
ington.edu.
biostatisphere_newsletter_winter4 4
Student-Faculty Collaboration
Continued from pg. 2.
“Thomas’ paper was about this particular method that
has some tricky issues involved,” said Janes. “We
worked to thoroughly understand these issues in order
to write up a paper that summarized in plain language
the tricky statistical issues in a way that would be help-
ful to epidemiologists.”
One of the original pioneers of case-crossover design,
Murray Mittleman, wrote a commentary to accompany
the article in the journal, basically sanctioning the out-
Biostat Faculty Profile: Al Hallstrom
Continued from pg. 3.
tions and compressions only had 10% survival. And
now the standard is to do 100 compressions when
you first get there, before you do anything else. Then
maybe do ventilations.
So I feel very proud about that because I was fight-
ing tradition at the very beginning just to bring it up.
UPCOMING EVENTS
March 1 UW Biostat and EH Professor Gerald
van Belle will give the SPHCM Dis-
tinguished Faculty Lecture, “Biosta-
tistics as a Distillation of Everyday
Experience,” 2:00-3:20 p.m., T639
Health Sciences Center.
May 31 Betz Halloran will deliver the 2007
Ross Prentice Lecture.
June 11-29 The 12th Annual Summer Institute
in Statistical Genetics, organized by
Institute director Bruce Weir, at UW
South Campus Center.
University of Washington
Department of Biostatistics
Campus Mail Stop 357232
Seattle, WA 98195-7232
RETURN SERVICE REQUESTED
lined strategies, and advising that the newer recom-
mendations be universally adopted.
Janes continues her work with environmental issues.
She is currently at the Department of Biostatistics at
Johns Hopkins University, working with Francesca
Dominici and Scott Zeger in environmental epidemiol-
ogy and developing a new method for diagnosing con-
founding bias.
What do you like to do in your spare time?
I love to build things. Over the years, I’ve built sev-
eral of the houses my family has lived in.
We have a house now near Lake Union, one I didn’t
build, and I’ve finally convinced my wife that since
we’ll soon be doing a lot of world travel, we should
move downstairs and rent the upstairs. So now I get
to do the downstairs kitchen.
June 25-28 2007 WNAR/IMS Western Regional
Meeting in Irvine, CA.
July 29-Aug 2 Joint Statistical Meetings at Salt
Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake
City, UT.
July 30 UW Biostat Alumni Reception at JSM.
Sept. 20-21 Department Retreat at Pack Forest.
For more information on UW Biostat events, please
visit the UW Biostatistics Web site at www.biostat.
washington.edu.
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