Frank Rockhold, a 1978 ScM graduate of our department who is now senior vice president of biomedical data sciences at Glaxo SmithKline, will be visiting our department on Monday, July 10 as a follow-up to a recent presentation Scott made at GSK regarding funding opportunities.  One proposal under consideration is for GSK to sponsor a "Glaxo SmithKline" professorship.  We are planning three 45-minute sessions (on genomics/bioinfromatics, clinical biostatistics, and biostatistics methods in general) and may ask faculty to attend/present at one of them. Please set aside 10:30-12:30 and 1:30-2:30 on Monday, July 10 to meet with him.

Search for tenure-track position

Scott Zeger will convene a screening committee for the tenure-track search.  Tentative committee members are Kung-Yee Liang, Karen Bandeen-Roche, Rafael Irizarry, Francesca Dominici, and Giovanni Parmigiani.  There was agreement for placing an ad in the October through December issues of Amstat News (as we have done in previous searches).

Informatics

Dean Klag invited Scott Zeger to a recent meeting about public health informatics and ways in which the School's scientific computing core could be used to bring clinical data into shape for research.  (Ross McKenzie, among others, was also in attendance.)  In light of our department's long-standing view that scientific computing is best done on a departmental basis, Scott has sent Mike Klag a draft proposal for a schoolwide "Center for Public Health Informatics" that would pool resources from many data-intensive projects (ie, Biostat and HPM Medicare data, EHS and MMI GIS-type projects, etc).  There was agreement that one of our faculty should be a liaison with this project.  There was also enthusiasm for having Scott follow up on this idea with Stephanie Reel, the University's Chief Information Officer.

PhD curriculum update

There will be special faculty meeting on Friday, June 9 at noon in Room E6519 to finalize the first and second-year PhD curriculum for 2006-07.  Dan Scharfstein reported that the proposal under discussion is to have a six-term theory sequence (two terms of probability, but at a higher level than is currently done in 671-2, and four terms of statistical inference) and a four or six-term methods sequence (combining  content of the 650 and 750 sequences but with greater integration with the theory sequence).

MHS in Biostatistics/Bioinformatics

Scott Zeger distributed admissions figures for the past several cycles for our department's various MHS programs.  There was agreement on the need for the MHS in biostatistics to have its own designated program director.  There was also acknowledgement of the need to increase awareness of and applications to the MHS in bioinformatics.  One possibility might be to have designated staff support.  Our goal for both MHS programs (biostatistics and bioinformatics) would be to have an average of ten new students each year.

New business for future faculty meetings

The following items will be scheduled for future faculty meetings:

1. appropriate incentives for faculty consulting;

2. management of HopkinsOne demands for faculty;

3. decision on what kinds of short courses we should be offering.