Biostatistics and SARS-CoV2: A talk by Prof Geert Molenberghs

ANU RSFAS invites you to an online seminar by Prof Geert Molenberghs, as he discusses the role biostatisticians can and actually should play a role in the response to the COVID-19 crisis.

Times (+/- some standard errors):  Thursday 25th November; 4:00pm – 5:30pm Canberra time. 

RSVP: No RSVP will be required for this meeting; please see below for the Zoom link. Any issues, please email yanrong.yang@anu.edu.au

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Topic: Biostatistics and SARS-CoV-2: research, policymaking, and communication.

Description: The COVID-19 pandemic, induced by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, is literally a rare event in the course of history. We need to go back to 1918 for an even worse pandemic, the Spanish Flu, or H1N1, although we also had the tuberculosis pandemic in the interbellum; there was the Russian flu in 1890 (maybe also a coronavirus and not influenza), and the plague that literally haunted the world for several centuries.

When there are no antiviral means to speak of, and in the absence of vaccines, time-honored non-pharmaceutical interventions enter stage. Apart from controlling the epidemic, for better or for worse, they generate side effects, for society, its well-being, and for the economy. Based on data and imperfect evidence, the biostatistician contributes to understanding what has happened and is happening, is able to separate signal from noise in predictions for the short- and mid-term future.

Biostatisticians can, and actually should play a role in the response to the COVID-19 crisis, ranging from mathematical and statistical modeling, over day-to-day monitoring,to scientific and government committee work and policy making. We place the mathematical and statistical work done against the background of its use towards policy making, public communication, and outreach in real time. Attention is given to the post-pandemic era, in terms of pandemic preparedness. 

Biosketch: Prof. Geert Molenberghs (M) was born in Antwerp, Belgium, on February 5, 1965. He is Professor of Biostatistics at the Universiteit Hasselt and KU Leuven in Belgium. He received the B.S. degree in mathematics (1988) and a Ph.D. in biostatistics (1993) from the Universiteit Antwerpen. Dr Molenberghs published methodological work on surrogate markers in clinical trials, categorical data, longitudinal data analysis, and on the analysis of non-response in clinical and epidemiological studies. He served as Joint Editor for  Applied Statistics, Co-editor for Biometrics, Co-editor for Biostatistics, Series Editor of Wiley Probability & Statistics, and Wiley StatsRef. He is currently Executive Editor of Biometrics. He acted and acts as Associate Editor for several journals and undertook numerous refereeing tasks (for journals, faculty member promotion, faculty member appointments, etc.). He was President of the International Biometric Society. He was elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association and received the Guy Medal in Bronze from the Royal Statistical Society. He has held visiting positions at the Harvard School of Public Health (Boston, MA). He is founding director of the Center for Statistics at Hasselt University and currently the director of the Interuniversity Institute for Biostatistics and statistical Bioinformatics, I-BioStat, a joint initiative of the Hasselt and Leuven universities. He published, as editor and author, several books on longitudinal data analysis, possibly subject to missingness (with Geert Verbeke) and surrogate endpoints. He has (co-)taught nearly 200 short and longer courses on the topic in universities as well as industry, in Europe, North America, Latin America, and Australia. He received research funding from FWO, IWT, the EU (FP7), U.S. NIH, U.S. NSF, UHasselt, and KU Leuven. He is member of the Belgian Royal Academy of Medicine.

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Zoom link:

Join Zoom Meeting

https://anu.zoom.us/j/86015752944?pwd=TEpvRjRrTDh0NWZMc0J3RDVNVndHQT09

Meeting ID: 860 1575 2944

Password: 069205