Subhash Aryal has received the President’s Award for Educational Excellence 2011 from President Scott Ransom. The President's Faculty Awards are intended to recognize and promote the best and brightest faculty of the UNT Health Science Center.

Robert D. Gibbons was interviewed by U.S. News & World Report about a recent study by Gibbons et al., published Online First by the Archives of General Psychiatry on February 6, 2012.

The study found that antidepressant drugs such as fluoxetine and venlafaxine decreased suicidal thoughts and behavior for adult and geriatric patients. For youths, no significant effects of treatment on suicidal thoughts and behavior were found, although depression responded to treatment. No evidence of increased suicide risk was observed in youths receiving active medication.

These findings are presented in the article “Suicidal Thoughts and Behavior With Antidepressant Treatment: Reanalysis of the Randomized Placebo-Controlled Studies of Fluoxetine and Venlafaxine” by Robert D. Gibbons, Ph.D., C. Hendricks Brown, Ph.D., Kwan Hur, Ph.D., John M. Davis, M.D., and J. John Mann, M.D.

Yaming Yu and Xiao-Li Meng have just published an interesting paper entitled "To Center or Not to Center: That Is Not the Question—An Ancillarity—Sufficiency Interweaving Strategy (ASIS) for Boosting MCMC Efficiency"  (with discussion  and rejoinder ), which appeared in the September 2011 issue of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics (JCGS).

The article was selected by the Editor as the Featured Article for the issue. There is a connection between the article and Xiao-Li Meng's inaugural Center for Health Statistics lecture on "Stigler's Law," where they state "The evolutionary history from DA to GIS and more generally to CIS may well be cited by a future Stephen Stigler to advance a new Stigler’s Law: No scientific idea is originated from a single team.”

The inaugural issue of the Interest Group on Statistics in Mental Health Research (SMHR) Newsletter is now available in its new WordPress blog format at http://smhr.org/newsletter/. We hope that this collaborative format will help the newsletter evolve into an online forum for SMHR, facilitating discussion among SMHR members. We look forward to your comments.

If you would like to contribute to future issues of the newsletter, please send a note to Robert Gibbons at and Naihua Duan at .

The Center for Health Statistics (CHS) of the University of Chicago is accepting applications for a non-tenure track position for a statistician or biostatistician interested in collaborative work and computation. The position involves collaboration with U of C faculty in the Department of Medicine and the Computational Institute. Interested parties should send a brief biosketch and CV to Brian Roland.

Professor Xiao-Li Meng has won one of the three 2011 ASA "Promoting the Practice and Profession of Statistics" video competition awards for Real-Life Statistics: Your Chance for Happiness (Or Misery), the video trailer for one of his statistics courses.

The competition was organized by the Public Awareness Group of the American Statistical Association (ASA).

More information about the Interest Group on Statistics in Mental Health Research (SMHR), its mission statement, membership details and events is now available at http://healthstats.org/smhr.

Center for Health Statistics members Naihua Duan and Robert Gibbons founded a new Interest Group on Statistics in Mental Health Research (SMHR). Support for the group came from nominations by forty-one statisticians who work in mental health research and related areas. The Interest Group received approval from the Council of Sections Governing Board of the American Statistical Association (ASA), http://amstat.org/sections/sectionlist.cfm.

More information about the SMHR, its mission statement and membership details will become available in the near future.

The Center for Health Statistics welcomes Xiao-Li Meng, Ph.D. Professor Meng is the Whipple V. N. Jones Professor of Statistics and Chair of the Department of Statistics at Harvard University.

Professor Xiao-Li Meng, Ph.D., Whipple V.N. Jones Professor and Chair of the Department of Statistics at Harvard University, presented "Mental Exercises for a Mental Health Study: Is it a Simpson’s Paradox or Stigler’s Law?" as the inaugural lecture for the Center for Health Statistics at the University of Chicago.

The lecture was co-sponsored by the University of Chicago Department of Health Studies and Department of Statistics.

More information about the event

The Center for Health Statistics welcomes Li Cai, Ph.D. Professor Cai is an Assistant Professor of Advanced Quantitative Methodology in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and Assistant Professor of Quantitative Psychology in the Department of Psychology at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

It is with great sadness that we report on the death of our friend and colleague, Tom Ten Have. Tom was a devoted husband, father, professor, statistical scientist, and a beloved colleague. Tom was 50 years old. In his distinguished career he published over 200 wonderful peer reviewed papers that established new trajectories for statistical research and scientific thinking.

Tom was a fellow of the American Statistical Association and a recipient of the Harvard Award for Lifetime Contributions to Psychiatric Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

The University of Chicago has named Professor Robert D. Gibbons one of the Pritzker Scholars in 2011.

The Pritzker family of Chicago, widely known philanthropists whose many business ventures include the Hyatt Hotel chain, made a gift of $30 million to the University of Chicago in 2002.

The gift has been used to recruit outstanding new faculty to the Biological Sciences Division of The Pritzker School of Medicine. These Pritzker scholars form uniquely synergistic and powerful groups of investigators. To date, there have been 18 Pritzker Scholars.

Professor Marlos Viana was recently invited to be an Associate Editor of the Journal of Biological Systems (JBS) after a few years serving on the editorial board. JBS publishes a broad spectrum of papers in all areas of methods/systems in biology.

The Columbia Center for Homelessness Prevention Studies and the New York State Psychiatric Institute Division of Biostatistics are delighted to invite you to attend a full-day workshop June 2, 2011 10am-4pm at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, 1051 Riverside Drive, New York City on "The Application of Instrumental Variable Methods in Health Services Research."

View the agenda 

Seats are limited, so please RSVP to by April 30. We hope you will join us!

The Center for Health Statistics welcomes Stephen Raudenbush, Ed.D. Professor Raudenbush is the Lewis-Sebring Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago and Chairman of the Committee on Education.

The Center for Health Statistics welcomes Juned Siddique, Ph.D. Professor Siddique is an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

The Center for Health Statistics welcomes Sanjib Basu, Ph.D. Professor Basu is a Professor of Statistics and Director of Graduate and Undergraduate Studies in the Division of Statistics at Northern Illinois University.

The Center for Health Statistics welcomes Ronald A. Thisted, Ph.D. Professor Thisted has been a faculty member in the Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago since 1976, and since 1999 he has also chaired the Department of Health Studies, which is the home for biostatistics, epidemiology, and health services research at the University of Chicago.

The Center for Health Statistics welcomes Yoonsang Kim. Yoonsang is a doctoral student in Biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a Research Assistant at the UIC Institute of Health Research and Policy.

The Center for Health Statistics welcomes Naihua Duan, Ph.D. Professor Duan is Professor of Biostatistics (in Psychiatry) in the Departments of Psychiatry and Biostatistics at Columbia University, and the Director of the Division of Biostatistics in the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI).

The Center for Health Statistics welcomes Joel B. Greenhouse, Ph.D. Professor Greenhouse is Professor of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University, and Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry and Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh.

The Center for Health Statistics welcomes Sharon-Lise T. Normand, Ph.D. Professor Normand is Professor of Health Care Policy (Biostatistics) in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School and Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health.

The Center for Health Statistics welcomes David O. Meltzer, MD, PhD. Professor Meltzer is Chief of the Section of Hospital Medicine, Director of the Center for Health and the Social Sciences, and Chair of the Committee on Clinical and Translational Science at The University of Chicago, where he is Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine, Department of Economics and the Harris School of Public Policy Studies.

A new version of the BIFACTOR program is available for download. New features and updates include the ability to easily eliminate the item number from the sub-domain to which it belongs and rerun the program, the scoring of sub-domains, and the removal of any previous restrictions on the number of factors, items, sub-domains, etc.

The new version is compatible with Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 7, and can work with previous versions of .DEF input files, provided that a 0 or 1 is added to the end of the third line of each existing .DEF file.

Download the program

The American Statistical Association (ASA) announced today the winners of its prestigious annual awards. Dr. Robert D. Gibbons will be receiving the Outstanding Statistical Application Award for the development of new and innovative statistical approaches to drug safety, and for clarifying the relationship between antidepressant pharmacotherapy and suicide.

Dr. Gibbons was nominated for the Outstanding Statistical Application Award by Dr. Donald Hedeker, UIC Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, who cited a seminal paper by Dr. Gibbons and colleagues:

Mixed-effects Poisson regression analysis of adverse event reports: The relationship between antidepressants and suicide
Robert D. Gibbons, Eisuke Segawa, George Karabatsos, Anup K. Amatya, Dulal K. Bhaumik, C. Hendricks Brown, Kush Kapur, Sue M. Marcus, Kwan Hur, J. John Mann
Statistics in Medicine, Vol. 27, Issue 11, pp. 1814-1833, May 2008.

In his nomination, Dr. Hedeker noted that "this paper builds on the foundational work of Dr. Gibbons and his colleagues in the area of the development of new and innovative statistical approaches to Drug Safety in general and the public health debate on the relationship between antidepressant pharmacotherapy and suicide in particular," which builds on work led by Dr. Gibbons and presented in four earlier papers.

Dr. Gibbons and the other award recipients will be honored on August 4, at the President's Address session of the ASA's 2009 Joint Statistical Meetings in Washington, DC.

Read the American Statistical Association press release.

Dr. Robert D. Gibbons will receive the Distinguished Faculty Award in recognition of his outstanding achievements in a wide range of scientific fields, which have earned him and the university national and international acclaim.

Dr. Gibbons' work links biostatistics, psychiatric epidemiology, and public policy, by developing, applying, and explaining complex statistical theory so it can be understood and employed in diverse scientific disciplines, as well as in public policy decision making.

The Distinguished Faculty Award will be presented at the Commencement Ceremony on May 8, 2009.

SuperMix combines the functionality of four mixed-effects programs, MIXREG, MIXOR, MIXNO, and MIXPREG, developed by Donald Hedeker and Robert Gibbons into a single application to provide estimates for mixed-effects regression models.

SuperMix extends the functionality available in the four Mixed-Up Suite programs by providing advanced data handling, the ability to reference columns by name, sophisticated import and export capability, visualization of data and results, increased analysis speed and additional statistical engine functions.

SuperMix has been developed by Scientific Software International under an SBIR Phase II contract N44MH32056. The application will fit models with continuous, count, ordinal, nominal, and survival outcome variables with nested data, allowing for up to three levels of nesting. For a more in-depth look at SuperMix and to download a free fully functional 15-day trial edition visit the SSI SuperMix homepage .

The MVPreg program computes a general multivariate probit regression model for the analysis of multivariate binary data.

Download the program

Robert D. Gibbons, Director of UIC Center for Health Statistics, has been appointed to a nine-member national expert panel that will provide professional opinion, interpretation, and conclusions on information and data to the “Blue Ribbon Work Group on Suicide Prevention in the Veterans Population.”

The expert panel will also make recommendations to the work group on opportunities for improvement in the US Department of Veterans Affair (VA) programs.

Read more about the work group's goals in the VA press release.

Dulal K. Bhaumik, Professor of Biostatistics, Psychiatry and Bio-engineering has been elected a 2008 Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) for his outstanding contributions to the development of Optimal Designs; Construction of Prediction and Tolerance Limits for Environmental Data; Hypotheses Testing for Mental Health Research; for Development of Statistical Methodology and Dissemination of Software for Analyzing Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Data; Statistical Education through outstanding teaching and service to the profession.

From the ASA By-Laws: "By the honorary title of Fellow the Association recognizes full members of established reputation who have made outstanding contributions in some aspect of statistical work." Given annually, this is a great honor as the numbers of recipients are limited to no more than 1/3 of 1% of the ASA membership.

The Haenszel Research Award is presented annually to an outstanding student in the Epidemiology and Biostatistics Division. This award is acknowledged at a special awards ceremony, and the winner receives a voucher for $200 to be used for travel, books, software, or equipment relevant to their work. The intent of this award is to foster high quality research among Epidemiology and Biostatistics Division students.

In the lead article of the April 2008 issue of Psychiatric Services, Robert D. Gibbons et al. investigate the combination of item response theory and computerized adaptive testing (CAT) as a means to reduce the time required to administer a collection of extensive, fixed-length psychiatric instruments for mental health measurement and diagnostic purposes.

The methodology described in Using Computerized Adaptive Testing to Reduce the Burden of Mental Health Assessment  streamlines and individualizes the measurement process, increases measurement precision and decreases respondent and clinician burden.

The article is featured in the issue's This Month's Highlights  and is further discussed in the Commentary, Are We Ready for Computerized Adaptive Testing 

The study examines whether U.S. and European regulatory agencies issued suicidality warnings led to a decrease in SSRI prescriptions for children and adolescents and consequently an increase in suicide rates as a result of untreated depression.

These findings are presented in the “Early Evidence on the Effects of Regulators’ Suicidality Warnings on SSRI Prescriptions and Suicide in Children and Adolescents” article by Robert D. Gibbons, Ph.D., C. Hendricks Brown, Ph.D., Kwan Hur, Ph.D., Sue M. Marcus, Ph.D., Dulal K. Bhaumik, Ph.D., Joëlle A. Erkens, Pharm.D., Ph.D., Ron M.C. Herings, Pharm.D., Ph.D., and J. John Mann, M.D.

The article appears in the September 2007 issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry.

A study of 226,866 veterans diagnosed with depression during 2003-2004 determined that the number of suicide attempts declined once treatment began, and that the rate of suicide attempts was lower in depressed veterans who took antidepressants than in those who did not.

The study is described in the “Relationship Between Antidepressants and Suicide Attempts: An Analysis of the Veterans Health Administration Data Sets” article by Robert D. Gibbons, Ph.D., C. Hendricks Brown, Ph.D., Kwan Hur, Ph.D., Sue M. Marcus, Ph.D., Dulal K. Bhaumik, Ph.D. and J. John Mann, M.D.

The article appears in the July 2007 issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry, the official journal of the American Psychiatric Association (read the News Release ).

Dr. Dulal K. Bhaumik has been invited to serve as an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA) .

The BIFACTOR program estimates the bifactor model for ordinal and dichotomous data.

Download the program

MIXZIP provides the maximum marginal likelihood estimates of mixed-effects Zero-Inflated Poisson (ZIP) regression models.

Download the installation program

A county-by-county study of the entire United States found that suicide rates among children ages 5-14 during the period 1996-1998 were lower in counties with higher numbers of antidepressant pills prescribed per person.

These findings are presented in the article "The Relationship Between Antidepressant Prescription Rates and Rate of Early Adolescent Suicide"  by Robert D. Gibbons, Ph.D., Kwan Hur, Ph.D., Dulal K. Bhaumik, Ph.D., and J. John Mann, M.D., of the Center for Health Statistics, University of Illinois at Chicago, and the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

The article appears in the November 2006 issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry, the official journal of the American Psychiatric Association (read the News Release ).

In this same issue, Dr. Gregory E. Simon, M.D., M.P.H., of the Group Health's Center for Health Studies compares the study's findings to those of other randomized trials and large observational studies in the editorial "How Can We Know Whether Antidepressants Increase Suicide Risk?" 

June 2005 marked the first meeting of a committee of academic and industry experts appointed by the Institute of Medicine to review the activities conducted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and to make recommendations to improve risk assessment, surveillance and the safe use of drugs.

Fifteen months later, the Assessment of the U.S. Drug Safety System committee, which includes Dr. Robert D. Gibbons, has published its findings and recommendations in its report released on September 22, 2006: The Future of Drug Safety: Promoting and Protecting the Health of the Public.

Read about the report's likelihood to intensify the debate over the current state of the U.S. federal system in charge of approving and regulating drugs and the proposed reforms of the F.D.A. in the New York Times article: Study Condemns F.D.A.'s Handling of Drug Safety (free registration required).

NIMH awarded a five-year, $3 million competitive renewal of the Mental Health Computerized Adaptive Testing Grant to Robert D. Gibbons, Ph.D. The aim of the investigation is to develop and evaluate computerized adaptive testing programs and algorithms for assessing depression.

The original study demonstrated the feasibility of item response theory (IRT), and computerized adaptive testing (CAT) in the development and administration of a large mental health rating scale. Using an item bank of 626 mood and anxiety disorder symptom items, the investigators found that 90% of the items in the item bank were discriminating of high and low levels of mood disorders, and the bi-factor IRT model did an excellent job of accounting for the clustering of items within symptom domains.

The initial study also found that CAT administration of the test resulted in a 95% reduction in the number of items administered to an individual subject (24 out of 626 items using simulated CAT and 31 items for live CAT testing), and the correlation between the CAT based impairment rating and the score based on all 626 items was r=0.93. Based on these results, the competitive renewal proposes to use IRT and CAT to develop a CAT Depression Inventory (CAT-DI).

"Confidence Regions for Random-Effects Calibration Curves with Heteroscedastic Errors" by Dulal K. Bhaumik and Robert D. Gibbons, published last year in the journal Technometrics has been declared this year's winner of the W. J. Youden Award in Interlaboratory Testing, from the American Statistical Association.

The Biostatistics Department of the Harvard School of Public Health today announced that Robert Gibbons, Ph.D., will receive this year's Harvard Award in Psychiatric Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

The award recognizes Dr. Gibbons' lifelong career contributions that have significantly advanced the field of Psychiatric Biostatistics. Dr. Gibbons will present the award lecture at the Harvard School of Public Health this Fall.

The book Statistical Methods for Detection and Quantification of Environmental Contamination by Dr. Robert D. Gibbons and David E. Coleman was included in the top five books for statisticians in Amstat News.

Read the review in Amstat News