National Institute of Statistical Sciences Names Three New People to Its Board of Trustees

Nov. 11, 2008 - PRLog -- The National Institute of Statistical Sciences Corporation Members voted unanimously to elect three new members to three-year terms on the Board of Trustees. The new trustees include: Roger W. Hoerl from GE Corporate Research & Development, George W. Williams from Amgen, and Susan S. Ellenberg of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. The elections took place at the NISS annual meeting on November 7.

Dr. Roger Hoerl is Manager of GE Research & Development’s Applied Statistics Lab. He partners on research projects with GE businesses ranging from NBC and GE Capital to GE Aircraft Engines and GE Power Systems. A Fellow of both the American Statistical Association (ASA) and the American Society for Quality (ASQ), he won ASQ’s 2001 Brumbaugh Award for the published paper with the greatest impact on industrial quality control applications. Hoerl is a co-author of Statistical Thinking: Improving Business Performance, an innovative guide to the strategic use of data and statistics in solving business problems.

Dr. George Williams is Vice President, Global Biomedical Data Sciences at Amgen. He joined Amgen in August 2002. Previously, he was Vice President, Biostatistics and Programming, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company. He joined BMS in December 2001 having retired from the position of Senior Vice President, Biostatistics and Research Data Systems, Merck Research Laboratories. From 1980 to 1991, Williams was the founding Chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, and from 1972 to 1980 he was on the faculty of the Department of Biostatistics, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Williams served as Vice President of the American Statistical Association, President of the Society for Clinical Trials, and a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences. He is a Fellow of the ASA, Society for Clinical Trials, the American College of Epidemiology, and the American Heart Association. He has served as a member of the ENAR Regional Committee and as a member of several NIH review committees and data and safety monitoring boards. Dr. Ellenberg is Associate Dean for Clinical Research, University of Pennsylvania SOM. Ellenberg’s research focuses on designing, conducting and analyzing data from clinical trials. She has published extensively in both statistical and medical journals, on topics including surrogate endpoints, data monitoring committees, clinical trial designs, adverse event monitoring, vaccine safety and special issues in cancer and AIDS trials. From 1993 to 2004 she served as Director, Office of Biostatistics and Epidemiology in the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; prior to that she served as the first Chief of the Biostatistics Research Branch in the Division of AIDS, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (1988-1993), and served in the Biometric Research Branch in the Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program, National Cancer Institute (1982-1988).
Ellenberg is a Fellow of the ASA, the Society for Clinical Trials and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. Her book, Data Monitoring Committees in Clinical Trials: A Practical Perspective, co-authored with Drs. Thomas Fleming and David DeMets, was named Wiley Europe Statistics Book of the Year for 2002.

About NISS
The National Institute of Statistical Sciences was established in 1990 by the national statistics societies and the Research Triangle universities and organizations, with the mission to identify, catalyze and foster high-impact, cross-disciplinary and cross-sector research involving the statistical sciences. NISS is dedicated to strengthening and serving the national statistics community, most notably by catalyzing community members’ participation in applied research driven by challenges facing government and industry. NISS also provides career development opportunities for statisticians and scientists, especially those in the formative stages of their careers. NISS is located in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

For more information about the NISS, go to www.niss.org.

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NISS was established in 1991 by the national statistics societies and the Research Triangle universities and organizations, with the mission to identify, catalyze and foster high-impact, cross- disciplinary research involving the statistical sciences.