Sept. 10, 2014
Jianwen Cai, PhD, professor and vice chair of the Gillings School of Global Public Health’s Department of Biostatistics, has been elected to lead the International Biometric Society’s (IBS) Eastern North American Region (ENAR), the international biostatistics professional organization. Cai, who joined the Gillings School faculty in 1992, will take office as president-elect on Jan. 1, 2015, and will serve successive years (2016-2017) as president and past-president.
“I’m very pleased that our department is able to contribute such an able leader to this major biostatistics professional organization,” said Michael R. Kosorok, PhD, W.R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor and chair of the department.
A number of Gillings School biostatistics faculty have held the three-year leadership role in ENAR, most recently Amy Herring, ScD, professor and associate department chair, who served from January 2010 through 2012.
Other faculty members who have served as ENAR president include Gary Koch, PhD, professor and director of the Biometric Consulting Laboratory, and Lisa LaVange, PhD, former Professor of the Practice of biostatistics and director of the biostatistics department’s Collaborative Studies Coordinating Center, now director of biostatistics at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; retired professor Jim Grizzle, PhD; and the late Bernard Greenberg, PhD, founding chair of the department.
Alumni who have served as ENAR president include Peter Imrey, PhD, professor of medicine at Case Western Reserve University and affiliate statistics professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Eric (Rocky) Feuer, PhD, branch chief in the Surveillance Research Program (SRP) at the National Cancer Institute; and DuBois Bowman, PhD, chair of biostatistics at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
“I am very excited to have this opportunity to serve the ENAR community and continue this legacy of our department,” Cai said.
IBS is the largest professional organization of biostatisticians and biometricians in the world, drawing its 5,800 members from more than 25 countries. ENAR is the largest subgroup of the organization, incorporating 1,600 members from the United States and Canada.
Gillings School of Global Public Health contact: David Pesci, director of communications, (919) 962-2600 or dpesci@unc.edu.