Donald M. Berwick

Update: Donald Berwick was confirmed through a recess appointment on July 7.

President Barack Obama recently nominated Donald Berwick to be administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Berwick, who was the 2008 Deming Lecturer, is currently president and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. He also is a clinical professor of pediatrics and health care policy in the department of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and professor of health policy and management in the Harvard School of Public Health.

A summa cum laude graduate of Harvard College, Berwick holds a master’s degree in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He earned his medical degree from Harvard Medical School, where he graduated cum laude.

For more information, read the White House Press Office announcement here.

Tomas Drgon

Tomas Drgon recently accepted the position of scientific review officer for the Biostatistical Methods and Research Design study section of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which reviews statistical grant proposals. Drgon’s research has focused on genomewide association studies for substance abuse, particularly applied to smoking cessation. His research interests include principal component analysis, directed acyclic graphs, graphical models, hierarchical models, clustering, Bayesian methods, and systems biology.

Drgon earned his PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology at Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia. He has been with NIH for 15 years, first at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and then at the National Institute on Drug Abuse. He will be transitioning to his new position at the Center for Scientific Review this summer.

Liang

Kung-Yee Liang

Kung-Yee Liang was recently named the Rema Lapouse Award recipient for 2010. The Rema Lapouse Award is granted annually for excellence in psychiatric epidemiology.

Liang is an internationally renowned epidemiologist and biostatistician. He earned his PhD in biomathematics-biostatistics from the University of Washington in 1982, before taking a position as professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. For many years, Liang served as director of the graduate program. He has been a visiting professor to Imperial College, Institute of Biometric Sciences, and served as vice president and acting president of the National Health Research Institutes in Taiwan.

Liang has published more than 200 articles in professional journals and seminal texts in biostatistics. He is known primarily for his innovative work in generalized linear models, particularly his and Zeger’s model for a generalized estimating equation approach, a breakthrough technique for family studies, multistage clustered samples in survey research, and longitudinal data.

A leading scientist in the field of genetic epidemiology, Liang has studied the genetics of a variety of psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder. His work in public health has included a range of cohort studies, such as the precursors study of Hopkins medical school graduates and several population-based cohorts with a focus on substance abuse and mental and personality disorders. He has organized scientific sessions and been an invited lecturer at numerous conferences and schools. Many of his articles are considered classics in biostatistics, winning accolades from leaders in his field.

Currently the editor of Statistica Sinica, he serves as coeditor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Biometrics, and Biostatistics. Liang has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Snedecor Award and the American Public Health Association (APHA) Spiegelman Award. In 1997, he received the Advising, Mentoring, and Teaching Recognition Award from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health Student Assembly.

Liang was recently offered the presidency of the National Yang-Ming University in his native Taiwan, where he will be returning this year. In addition, he will direct neuroscience and psychiatry research in the medical school, considered one of the most prestigious in Asia.

Liang’s award ceremony and lecture will take place during a special session of the APHA during its annual meeting in Denver, Colorado, in November.

McGready

John McGready

The ASA Section on Teaching Statistics in the Health Sciences (TSHS) recently named John McGready winner of its Outstanding Teaching Award.

McGready is an assistant scientist in the department of biostatistics at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. While at Johns Hopkins, he has won six school-wide teaching awards and developed the online course, “Statistical Reasoning in Public Health I and II,” which has consistently received top ratings in distance education courses. In fact, McGready has won the Excellence in Online Teaching Award twice.

McGready is also the developer and co-instructor of Data Analysis Workshops I and II, offered in the winter and summer institutes of epidemiology and biostatistics at Johns Hopkins. Colleagues have commented on his enthusiasm for teaching, his dedication to teaching biostatistics, and his “… extraordinary teaching excellence. …” He also won the TSHS Best Contributed Paper Award in 2006.

McGready will be recognized during the TSHS business meeting and mixer at JSM 2010 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Michael Kane

Michael Kane of Yale University was recently named winner of the ASA Section on Statistical Computing’s Chambers Award for “The Bigmemory Project,” an R package that implements massive matrices and their supporting manipulation and exploration.

In addition to the $1,000 prize, Kane will have his JSM registration paid for by the section and be reimbursed for travel and housing. The award will be presented during the section’s business meeting and mixer at JSM.

Sallie Keller

Sallie Keller, the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of Engineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas, was recently appointed director of the Institute for Defense Analyses of the Science and Technology Policy Institute (STPI) in Washington, DC. She will assume her new duties in September.

Keller brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to STPI. A past-president of the ASA, Keller was a group leader for the Statistical Sciences Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1998–2005 and currently chairs a network Grand Challenge Advisory Board for Sandia National Laboratory. She also served as the program director for statistics and probability in the Division of Mathematical Sciences at the National Science Foundation.

Active on advisory committees, Keller chaired a number of National Research Council panels, including one on modeling and simulation for defense transformation. She is a Fellow of the ASA and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a National Associate of the National Academy of Sciences.

To read more about Keller’s appointment, visit Rice University’s website.

Larry Nelson of North Carolina State University, Winston Richards of Penn State University, and David Banks of Duke University

Winston Richards

Friends, family, and statisticians gathered in Durham, North Carolina, on May 2 to celebrate the 75th birthday of Winston Richards, who teaches at Pennsylvania State University in Harrisburg and is a longtime visitor and teacher during the summer at Stanford.

The birthday party was a more intimate reprise of the larger celebration that occurred during the recent Statistics Week conference at the University of the West Indies in Richard’s native Trinidad. He and Ingram Olkin were the guest speakers there.

Richard’s students, colleagues, and friends in the profession probably know him best for his public work—he is a gifted teacher, mentor, and dedicated ambassador of statistics to the public. However, the May 2 celebration provided a window into his private life. He and his wife, Kathleen, have eight children and more grandchildren than guests could count.

Richards is a Fellow of the ASA and past-president of the ASA’s Harrisburg Chapter. He has served on several ASA committees, most recently the Committee on Membership Retention and Recruitment.