ENAR (the Eastern North American Region of the International Biometrics Society), together with IMS and Sections of ASA, holds a meeting each spring. The ENAR 2020 Spring Meeting will be held at the JW Marriott Nashville from March 22–25, 2020. The meeting brings together researchers and practitioners from academia, industry and government, connected through a common interest in Biometry. Registration is open now, via the meeting website: https://enar.org/meetings/spring2020/. Early bird meeting registration fees are available through January 15, 2020.

The meeting includes a “Fostering Diversity in Biostatistics” workshop on Sunday, March 22. The workshop, which marks its 20th anniversary this year, will provide a forum for discussion of important issues related to diversity. Themes of the workshop will include career and training opportunities within biostatistics. The workshop will focus on connecting underrepresented minority students interested in biostatistics with professional biostatisticians in academia, government and industry. Registration is required and lunch will be provided: https://enar.org/meetings/FosteringDiversity/

The preliminary program is online now: download your copy, which includes the IMS Invited Program, from the ENAR meeting website, at https://enar.org/meetings/spring2020/program/Preliminary_Program.pdf

ENAR Presidential Invited Speaker is Sharon-Lise Normand, the S. James Adelstein Professor of Health Care Policy (biostatistics) in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School and in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. Read about her talk, and her life, below.

Medical Product, Healthcare Delivery, and Road Safety Policies: Seemingly Unrelated Regulatory Questions

The evaluations of medical product effectiveness and safety, the quality of hospital care, and the safety of U.S. roadways involve the use of large, complex observational data to make policy decisions. Careful design and analysis of such data are critical given the large populations impacted. While increasing access to data of increased size and type permit, in theory, richer evaluations, study design should assume a more prominent role. This talk will describe three different policy problems: the impact of the hospital readmission reduction program, the effectiveness of seemingly similar drug eluting coronary stents, and the safety of U.S. motor carriers. Statistical issues common across these problems, including clustered data, multiple treatments, multiple outcomes, high-dimensional data, and lack of randomization, are highlighted and solutions discussed.

Sharon-Lise Normand is the S. James Adelstein Professor of Health Care Policy (biostatistics) in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, and in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Normand earned her BSc (1984) and MSc (1985) degrees in statistics from the University of Western Ontario and her PhD (1990) in biostatistics from the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the development of statistical methods for health services and regulatory policy research, primarily using Bayesian and causal inference approaches. She has developed a long line of research on methods for the analysis of patterns of treatment and quality of care for patients with cardiovascular disease and with mental disorders in particular. Dr. Normand has developed analytical approaches for comparing hospitals and physicians using outcomes and process-based measures. Since 2002, she has served as director of Mass-DAC, the data-coordinating center responsible for collecting, analyzing, and reporting on the quality of care for adults discharged following a cardiac procedure from all non-federal hospitals in Massachusetts. She serves as the director of the Medical Device Epidemiology Network (MDEpiNet) Methodology Center. Her focus is on the development of statistical approaches to active medical device surveillance, valid inferences from distributed networks, and the improvement of causal inference in the presence of high dimensional data. On the mental health side, Dr. Normand is leading an NIMH-funded study to estimate the value of publicly funded mental health care for patients with serious mental illness. Dr. Normand is an elected fellow of the ASA, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American College of Cardiology, and Associate Member of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons. She served as the 2010 ENAR President; was inaugural co-chair of the PCORI Methodology Committee; co-chairs a Committee on National Statistics/National Academy of Sciences panel reviewing the Safety Measurement System of the Compliance, Safety, Accountability program run by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration; and served on several NAS Committees, including the Committee of Applied and Theoretical Statistics (CATS). Dr. Normand received ASA’s Health Policy Statistics Section Long-Term Excellence Award, the Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Heart Association, the L. Adrienne Cupples Award for Excellence in Teaching, Research, and Service in Biostatistics from Boston University, and the Mosteller Statistician of the Year from ASA’s Boston Chapter.