Statement of Task

Current CATS Activities:

Member Roster and Biographies

Karen Kafadar, Chair, Indiana University is Rudy Professor of Statistics and Physics. She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees from Stanford and her Ph.D. in Statistics from Princeton under John Tukey. Her research focuses on exploratory data analysis, robust methods, characterization of uncertainty in quantitative studies, and analysis of experimental data in the physical, chemical, biological, and engineering sciences. Prior to Indiana University, she was Professor and Chancellor’s Scholar in the Departments of Mathematical Sciences and Preventive Medicine & Biometrics at the University of Colorado-Denver; Fellow at the National Cancer Institute (Cancer screening section); and Mathematical Statistician at Hewlett Packard Company (R&D laboratory for RF/Microwave test equipment) and at National Institute of Standards and Technology (where she continues as Guest Faculty Visitor on problems of measurement accuracy, experimental design, and data analysis). Previous engagements include consultancies in industry and government as well as visiting appointments at University of Bath, Virginia Tech, and Iowa State University. She has served on previous NRC committees and also on the editorial review boards for several professional journals as Editor or Associate Editor and on the governing boards for the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the International Statistical Institute. She is an Elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the International Statistical Institute, and has authored over 80 journal articles and book chapters, and has advised numerous M.S. and Ph.D. students

Amy Braverman, Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a senior member of the Information Systems and Computer Science Staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, working in the Data Understanding Systems Group. Her research on large data sets, addresses a broad range of topic areas including statistical analysis of massive data sets, data compression and information-theoretic approaches to data reduction, data mining/unsupervised learning, statistical problems in evaluation of climate models, high-dimensional data visualization and analysis, and analysis of remote sensing data. Dr. Braverman earned her MA in mathematics and her PhD in statistics from University of California at Los Angeles. She is currently the president of the Interface Foundation of North America, and is also an active member of the American Statistical Association, the American Geophysical Union, and the International Association for Statistical Computing’s European Region.

Constantine Gatsonis, PhD, is Professor of Medical Science (Biostatistics) and Applied Mathematics and Acting Head of the Biostatics Section of the Department of Community Health. He joined the faculty 1995 and became the founding Director of the Center for Statistical Sciences. Dr. Gatsonis is a leading authority on the design and analysis of clinical trials of diagnostic and screening modalities and has extensive involvement in methodologic research in medical technology assessment and in health services and outcomes research. He is Group Statistician of the American College of Radiology Imaging Network (ACRIN), a NCI funded collaborative group conducting multi-center studies of diagnostic imaging and image-guided therapy for cancer. In his ACRIN work, Dr. Gatsonis is the chief statistician of the Digital Mammography Imaging Screening Trial (a national study comparing digital to film mammography) and is also the chief statistician for ACRIN's arm of the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST). Dr Gatsonis was the lead statistician of the International Breast MRI Consortium and of the Radiologic Diagnostic Oncology Group (RDOG). Dr. Gatsonis has served on numerous review and advisory panels, including the HSDG Study Section of the Agency for Health Care Policy Research, panels of the Center for Devices and Radiological Health of FDA, the Commission of Technology Assessment of the American College of Radiology, Data Safety and Monitoring Boards for NINDS and the VA, the Immunization Safety Review Committee of the Institute of Medicine. He is a member of the steering group of the STARD project (Standards for Reporting of Diagnostic Accuracy), which recently published the first comprehensive checklist for reporting the results of diagnostic test evaluations. He is also co-convenor of the Screening and Diagnostic Tests Methods Working Group of the Cochrane Collaboration and a member of the steering group of the Cochrane Diagnostic Reviews initiative, which is developing the methodologic and organizational infrastructure for the inclusion of systematic reviews of diagnostic accuracy in the Cochrane Library. Dr. Gatsonis is the founding editor-in-chief of Health Services and Outcomes Research Methodology and serves as a deputy editor of Academic Radiology and a member of the editorial board of Clinical Trials. Previous editorial experience includes membership of the editorial board of Statistics in Medicine , and Medical Decision Making . Dr. Gatsonis was elected fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Association for Health Services Research

Michael F. Goodchild is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Chair of the Executive Committee, National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA); Associate Director of the Alexandria Digital Library Project; and Director of NCGIA’s Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science. He received his BA degree from Cambridge University in Physics in 1965 and his PhD in Geography from McMaster University in 1969. After 19 years at the University of Western Ontario, he moved to Santa Barbara in 1988. He was Director of NCGIA from 1991 to 1997. He was elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and Foreign Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2002, and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006. He has received honorary doctorates from Laval University (1999), Keele University (2001), McMaster University (2004), and Ryerson University (2004). In 1990 he was given the Canadian Association of Geographers Award for Scholarly Distinction, in 1996 the Association of American Geographers award for Outstanding Scholarship, in 1999 the Canadian Cartographic Association’s Award of Distinction for Exceptional Contributions to Cartography, and in 2002 the Educator of the Year Award from the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science. In 2001 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. He was Editor of Geographical Analysis between 1987 and 1990 and Editor of the Methods, Models, and Geographic Information Sciences section of the Annals of the Association of Americal Geographers from 2000 to 2006. He serves on the editorial boards of ten other journals and book series. His major publications include Accuracy of Spatial Databases (1989); Geographical Information Systems: Principles and Applications (1991); Environmental Modeling with GIS (1993); GIS and Environmental Modeling: Progress and Research Issues (1996); Scale in Remote Sensing and GIS (1997); Interoperating Geographic Information Systems (1999); Geographical Information Systems: Principles, Techniques, Management and Applications (1999); Geographic Information Systems and Science (2001 and 2005); Spatial Uncertainty in Ecology (2001); Spatial Data Quality (2002); Uncertainty in Geographical Information (2002); Foundations of Geographic Information Science (2003); Spatially Integrated Social Science (2004); and GIS, Spatial Analysis, and Modeling (2005); in addition he is author of some 350 scientific papers. He was Chair of the National Research Council’s Mapping Science Committee from 1997 to 1999; has been a member of NRC's Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications; and is currently a member of NRC's Geographic Science Committee. His current research interests center on geographic information science, spatial analysis, and uncertainty in geographic data.

Kathryn Laskey is Professor of Systems Engineering and Operations Research at George Mason University (GMU). She received her master’s Degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan and her Ph.D. in Statistics and Public Affairs from Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Laskey studies Bayesian inference and decision theory, multi-source fusion, uncertainty in artificial intelligence, and situation assessment. Her broad research interest is the use of information technology to support better inference and decision making. Within this area, her interests lie in understanding the proper role of normative, behavioral, and computational theories in the modeling and support of decision making. Dr. Laskey is a Research Fellow with the Krasnow Institute for Cognitive Science at GMU University and a Research Associate with the Center of Excellence in Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence at GMU.

Michael E. Lesk of Rutgers University is an expert on information retrieval and digital government. He chairs the Department of Library and Information Science at Rutgers. While obtaining a doctorate in chemical physics, he worked for the SMART project, wrote much of their retrieval code, and did many of the retrieval experiments. In the 1970s, Prof. Lesk worked in the group that built Unix, and his accomplishments included creation of Unix tools for word processing, compiling, and networking. In the 1980s he worked on specific information systems applications, mostly with geography and dictionaries, as well as running a research group at Bellcore. And in the 1990s he worked on a large chemical information system, the CORE project, with Cornell, OCLC, ACS and CAS. From 1998-2002 he headed the NSF’s Division of Information and Intelligent Systems. Prof. Lesk has received the “Flame” award for lifetime achievement from Usenix in 1994 and is a Fellow of the ACM.

Thomas A. Louis, Ph.D., is Professor of Biostatistics, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He earned his PhD in Mathematical Statistics from Columbia University, followed by positions as Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Boston University; Associate Professor of Biostatistics, Harvard SPH; Professor and Head of Biostatistics, University of Minnesota SPH; Senior Statistical Scientist, RAND. Research includes risk assessment; environmental and public policy; Bayesian modeling and the analysis of observational studies. Current applications include assessing the health effects of air-borne particulate matter, assessing the cardio-pulmonary complications of AIDS therapy, collaborating with the United States Renal Data System data center; mathematical modeling of infectious diseases; design and analysis of a longitudinal study of student health profiles. He has published over 200 articles, books/chapters, monographs and discussions. Professor Louis is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and of the American Association for the Advance-ment of Science. From 2000 through 2003, he was coordinating editor of The Journal of the American Statistical Association. He has served as president of the Eastern North American Region of the International Biometric Society and is currently serving terms as vice-president then president of the parent organization. From 2000-2005, he served on the Health Review Committee of the Health Effects Institute. National Academy panel and committee service includes the Committee on National Statistics, the Panel on Estimates of Poverty for Small Geographic Areas, the Panel on Formula Allocation of Federal and State Program Funds (chair), the Board of the Institute of Medicine’s Medical Follow-up Agency, the IOM Panel to Assess the Health Consequences of Service in the Persian Gulf War and the Committee on the use of Third Party Toxicity Research.

Michael A. Newton is Professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison, in the Departments of Statistics and of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, where he has worked since completing his PhD in Statistics at the University of Washington in 1991. Dr. Newton's research concerns the use of statistics in the biological sciences, specifically inference problems in transcriptional and genomic variation, and problems from cancer biology. He leads the biostatistics training program at UW Madison and serves as a co-editor of the Annals of Applied Statistics. He is Fellow of the American Statistical Association and 2004 recipient of the Presidents' Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies.

Michael Stein, University of Chicago, is the Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor of Statistics. He received his PhD in Statistics from Stanford in 1984 and has been at Chicago since 1985 after spending a year at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. His research focuses on statistical models and methods for spatial and spatial-temporal processes with applications to environmental processes. He is currently the director of the Center for Integrating Statistical and Environmental Science, funded by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Dr. Stein is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He has published one book and over sixty papers and has directed or co-directed the doctoral dissertations of 17 students. He has served on several editorial boards, including for the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Annals of Statistics and Cambridge University Press and is currently the Editor for physical science, computation, the environment, and engineering at the newly formed Annals of Applied Statistics.