Applied Statistics – Harrington 

 This week the Applied Statistics Workshop will present a talk by David Harrington, Professor of Biostatistics at Harvard’s School of Public Health, and in the Department of Biostatistical Science at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.   

 Professor Harrington received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and taught at the University of Virginia before coming to Harvard.  He has served as Principal Investigator on numerous NIH and NSF grants researching topics including Nonparametric Tests for Censored Cancer Data, and Statistical Problems for Markov Branching Processes.   His research has appeared in Journal of the American Statistical Association, Biostatistics, Genetic Epidemiology, Journal of Clinical Oncology, and Biometrics among many others.   

  Professor Harrington is involved in two different lines of research. The first is research in statistical methods for clinical trials and prospective cohort studies in which the time to an event is a primary outcome. He has worked in efficient nonparametric tests and regression methods for right-censored data, sequential designs for clinical trials, and nonparametric methods for estimating nonlinear covariate effects on survival. Recently, he and co-workers in the Department of Biostatistics have been studying methods for analyzing survival data when some covariates have missing observations. Missing data are common in both prospective and retrospective cohort studies, and simply ignoring cases with missing observations can lead to substantial biases in inference.  

 Dr. Harrington 's second line of research, on which he will be presenting, is collaborative research in cancer.  He is the principal investigator of the Statistical Coordinating Center for the Cancer Care Outcomes Research and Surveillance (CanCORS) Consortium. This NCI-funded study is a network of sites around the country that are conducting a population-based study of access to and outcomes from cancer care, with special focus on ethnic subgroups and subgroups defined by age.  

 Professor Harrington will present a talk entitled  "Statistical Issues in the Cancer Care Outcomes Research and Surveillance Consortium (CarCORS)."  The presentation will be at noon on Wednesday, December 13 in Room N354, CGIS North, 1737 Cambridge St. Lunch will be provided.