Annual Report 2008.pdf - SAMSI

• Several program participants gave talks in a session entitled “Dynamic Treatment Regimes:
Practice and Theory,” organized by P. Thall (Biostatistics, M. D. Anderson) at the 2008
ENAR Spring Meeting: S. Murphy (Statistics, University of Michigan), “Screening
Experiments for Dynamic Treatment Regimes;” P. Thall, “Two-Stage Treatment Strategies
Based on Sequential Failure Times;” and A. Rotnitzky (Statistics, Di Tella University,
Argentina, and Biostatistics, Harvard), “Optimal Treatment and Testing Strategies with
Possibly Non-ignorable Observation Processes.”
• Several program participants gave talks in a session entitled “On the Utility of Deterministic
Models for Causal Effects” at the 2008 ENAR Spring Meeting: J. Lok (Biostatistics,
Harvard), “Mimicking Counterfactual Outcomes to Avoid Deterministic Effects;” and J.
Robins (Biostatistics, Harvard), “Causal Models for the Effects of Weight Gain on
Mortality.”
• M. Davidian (Statistics, North Carolina State University) gave a entitled “An Introduction
to Dynamic Treatment Regimes” at the School of Public Health at University of Alabama,
Birmingham.
• A. Gaweda (Medicine, University of Louisville) gave a talk to the NIH Biomedical
Computing Interest Group entitled “Application of Control Theory and Machine Learning to
Drug Dose Determination” at NIH.
• S. Murphy (Statistics, University of Michigan) gave a talk on “Experiments and Dynamic
Treatment Regimes” at the NIAID Biostatistics Research Branch.
• S. Murphy (Statistics, University of Michigan) gave a talk on “Novel Clinical Trial
Designs” at the 98th Annual Meeting American Psychopathological Association, New York.
• S. Murphy (Statistics, University of Michigan) will present a talk on developing dynamic
treatment regimes at the INFORMS meeting (organized by J. Ivy, Industrial Engineering,
North Carolina State University).
• M. Davidian (Statistics, North Carolina State University) will be a discussant in a session on
mathematical modeling and simulation to design treatment strategies at the Health Care
Engineering Symposium (organized by S. Roberts, Industrial Engineering, North Carolina
State University)
• M. Qian (Graduate Student in Statistics, University of Michigan) was selected to give a talk
on “Model Selection for Individualized Treatment Rules with Lasso Penalty” at the
Michigan Student Symposium for Interdisciplinary Statistical Sciences.
• A. Tsiatis (Statistics, North Carolina State University) has been invited to give a
presentation to the Directors of the Institutes of NIH on novel methodological challenges in
biomedical research; his talk will promote the need to study treatment as multi-stage
decision making.