PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — At a conference Oct. 7-9, 2015, at the Biltmore Hotel, Constantine Gatsonis, the Henry Ledyard Goddard University Professor of Biostatistics, delivered a plenary talk to more than 240 colleagues and then received their applause as the winner of the American Statistical Association’s Health Policy Statistics Section Long-Term Excellence Award.
“As one of the founders of the Health Policy Statistics Section of the ASA, co-chair of the first International Conference on Health Policy Statistics in 1995, and founding editor in chief of the journal Health Services and Outcomes Research Methodology, I was deeply touched by this honor at the 11th ICHPS, held in Providence this year,” said Gatsonis, who chairs the Department of Biostatistics in the Brown University School of Public Health.
For decades, Gatsonis has developed methods to study variations in health care utilization and outcomes, to compare health care providers, and to evaluate medical technology for diagnosis and prediction. More recently he has focused on ways to access and link large sources of health care data, notably health insurance and electronic medical records, to study the effectiveness of medical tests. On the website of the 11th International Conference on Health Policy Statistics, Gatsonis is acknowledged as “a world leader in methods for applying and synthesizing evidence on diagnostic tests in medicine.”
Graduate student Chenyang Gu was one of several students who presented work to more than 240 attendees.
In addition to Gatsonis, more than a dozen other Brown faculty members and students presented at the meeting, including Professors Issa Dahabreh, Fenghai Duan, Ani Eloyan, Roee Gutman, Joseph Hogan, Hana Lee, Chris Schmid, and Tom Trikalinos. They covered topics ranging from inferring causality from data, combining information from different sources, and accounting for confounding factors in data analysis.