PITT PUBLIC HEALTH MAGAZINE - “The phrase ‘If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere,’ certainly applies to me,” says Brooklyn, N.Y., native BILL SOLLECITO. However, it was his formative years spent in Pittsburgh at Pitt Public Health that made him—both personally and professionally—who he is today.
While completing her MPH and PhD degrees, Buchanich worked full time for the Department of Biostatistics at Pitt Public Health and was appointed research assistant professor and deputy director of the Center for Occupational Biostatistics and Epidemiology in 2008. She has served as principal investigator or coinvestigator on many studies in occupational health epidemiology, vital status systems and tracing, and other topic areas.
VINCENT ARENA was awarded emeritus status after retiring from the Department of Biostatistics as associate professor. He was on the faculty for 31 years. His primary research focuses on the understanding of the epidemiology and etiology of juvenile onset diabetes, the evaluation of health risk effects from outdoor air pollution, and the characterization of lifestyle risk factors and their effect on physical activity levels.
PITT MAGAZINE - Two of Pitt’s featured “change agents” are Pitt Public Health grads. SEUNG WOOK LEE (BIOS '79, '82) and HYUN KYUNG MOON (EPI '86) were pioneers and trailblazers in their fields whose careers were made possible by degrees from Pitt. “Everything I’ve done is possible because of Pitt,” says Moon. “It gave me the credentials to be in the room."
Biostatistics faculty member and scientific director of the Public Health Dynamics Laboratory, SAUMYADIPTA PYNE, and co-editors A.S. Rao and C.R. Rao have recently published a 2-volume title, "Handbook of Statistics: Disease Modelling and Public Health" which will serve as a vital resource for statisticians who need to access a number of different methods for assessing epidemic spread in populations, or in formulating public health policy.
Given by the American Statistical Association in partnership with the International Chinese Statistical Association, the award provides travel support to the ASA Conference on Statistical Practice. This year, BIOST's LINGYUN LYU is one of the recipients.
CENTRAL VALLEY BUSINESS TIMES - The analysis of California death rates was conducted at the county level using data from the Mortality and Population Data System (MPDS) at Pitt Public Health. Data from biostatisticians JEANINE BUCHANICH, SHANNON WOOLLEY, and MICHAEL LANN include ICD codes for underlying causes of death for nearly all U.S. deaths since 1950.
90.5 WESA - Who’s needed to fight the battle? At the October 2, 2017, conference sponsored by the PUBLIC HEALTH DYNAMICS LABORATORY and CTSI, CDC’s Sarah Bacon said an essential group of people must crunch the numbers to better understand the hows and the whys of the crisis: mathematicians, epidemiologists, data scientists, and statisticians.
SAUMYADIPTA PYNE, scientific director for the Public Health Dynamics Laboratory (PHDL) has been selected to receive two oration awards, both of which will be presented to him in India in November: The 2017 Subha Mukherjee Memorial Oration from the Physiological Society of India, and the Kiruba Sankar Memorial Oration from the St. John’s National Academy of Health Sciences in Bangalore.
PITTWIRE - On Saturday evening, October 18, 2017, the inaugural Goldman Prize Competition judges announced an $10,000 award for Triple Note: A Data Collection and Instruction App developed by LAUREL CHIAPPETTA, biostatistics core instructor, and Mary Margaret Kerr. The program helps field researchers store and access data, video, images, audio, ad other information in a single cloud-based source.