August 9, 2007

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – “Toward Individualizing Treatment to the Patient: An Introduction to Dynamic Treatment Regimes” will be the focus of a lecture Sept. 12 at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) by Marie Davidian, Ph.D., William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor of Statistics, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, North Carolina State University.

Davidian is the 2007 recipient of the UAB School of Public Health Section on Statistical Genetics and Department of Biostatistics Janet L. Norwood Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Woman in Statistical Sciences. The Norwood Award - a plaque and $5,000 - is presented annually by the Department of Biostatistics in the UAB School of Public Health.

The program will be held at the Alys Stephens Center Reynolds-Kirschbaum Recital Hall on the UAB campus, 1200 10th Avenue South. The lecture begins at 9:30 a.m. with a reception to follow at 11 a.m. It is free and open to the public, but reservations are requested. For more information, or to make reservations, call 205-975-9193.

Davidian’s lecture will address how physicians periodically adjust, change, modify, or discontinue therapies based on the patient’s observed progress, side effects, compliance, and so on, with the goal of individualizing treatment to the patient in order to provide the best care. Often, she says, the decisions are based on provider experience and judgment. A dynamic treatment regime, also referred to as an adaptive treatment strategy, is a set of formal rules that dictate how to make decisions on treatment of a patient over time.

Each rule, according to Davidian’s research, corresponds to a point at which a decision is to be made on changing, modifying, augmenting, stopping, or starting treatment, and takes as input information on the patient up to that point. Based on this information, the rule outputs the next treatment action. Thus, dynamic treatment regimes are algorithms that allow sequential treatment decisions to be individualized through a principled, evidenced-based set of rules that attempt to operationalize and systematize the way clinicians manage patients in practice.

Davidian has had a distinguished career in statistics. She has been a professor of statistics or biostatistics at distinguished institutions, including Harvard University, Duke University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is executive editor of the professional journal Biometrics and on the editorial board of the ASA-SIAM Series on Statistics and Applied Probability. She also is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

The Janet L. Norwood Award, first given in 2002, is named in honor of the first woman commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and past-president of the American Statistical Association and is given to an internationally recognized statistician. The UAB School of Public Health created the award to recognize Norwood’s achievements and to recognize the contribution of all women to the statistical sciences. The award is designed to help promote and honor the active involvement of women in the statistical sciences at all levels from high school through senior faculty and scientists.