Bradley Carlin

Carlin

The University of Minnesota School of Public Health (SPH) has appointed Bradley P. Carlin head of the division of biostatistics.

Carlin, who has been a professor in the SPH since 1991, will take over as division head in May. He will work with other SPH leaders to solidify the division’s ranking as one of the top biostatistics units in the nation. In addition to continuing the high level of research productivity among the division’s faculty members, he will work to grow the division’s student body and educational programs, as well as its focus on collaborative, translational research.

“As head of the division of biostatistics, I’m looking forward to working with colleagues across the University of Minnesota Academic Health Center,” said Carlin. “More and more, it’s critical for biostatisticians to collaborate with colleagues across the health sciences. Our division has a good track record of this sort of collaboration in the broader areas of clinical trials and environmental health, as well as the study of complex chronic conditions such as cancer, heart and lung disease, and HIV/AIDS.”

John R. Finnegan, dean of the School of Public Health and assistant vice president for public health, is pleased to have Carlin join school leadership. “Carlin’s energy and critical thinking will be an asset to his division and to the entire school,” said Finnegan. “I’m looking forward to working with him in this next stage of his career and in this next chapter of division leadership.”

Carlin’s research interests include statistical applications in AIDS research, clinical trial monitoring, joint longitudinal and survival modeling, and spatial and spatio-temporal disease mapping. He also conducts geographical analysis by analyzing geographically indexed public health data. He is an expert in Bayes and empirical Bayes methodology, as well as Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for their implementation.

In 2003, Carlin was named Mayo Professor in Public Health, the highest faculty honor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. He has received the Mortimer Spiegelman Award from the American Schools of Public Health Association. He is also the 2008 recipient of the University of Minnesota School of Public Health Leonard M. Schuman Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Kung-Yee Liang

Kung-Yee Liang was recently selected as president of National Yang-Ming University (NYMU) in Taipei, Taiwan. Currently a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Liang will begin his appointment August 1.

A Fellow of the American Statistical Association, Liang has several goals as the new president of NYMU. The first will be “to maintain and enrich the tradition the university has had in devoting to the society,” said Liang. “Another will be to inject the concept and raise the awareness of public health as a part of the medical curriculum.” He also said he intends to “promote interdisciplinary collaborations, both in terms of research and education.”

NYMU was founded in 1975 as the Yang-Ming Medical College and became National Yang-Ming University in 1994 with six colleges, including medicine, dental, nursing, life science, medical engineering, and humanity. It is the first medically oriented university in Taiwan, with approximately 4,400 students (1,800 undergraduates) and 400 faculty members.

Jorge Luis Romeu

The 2007 Thomas L. Saaty Prize was awarded to Jorge Luis Romeu of Syracuse University, New York, for his paper, “Operations Research and Statistics Techniques: Keys to Quantitative Data Mining.” The judges noted, “This paper critically overviews the main applications of statistics and operations research to the quantitative aspects of knowledge discovery in databases and data mining. It provides motivation for researchers with different backgrounds to interact for the common good and progress.”

Romeu’s paper appeared in Volume 26 of the American Journal of Mathematical and Management Sciences.