Please bring a friend and join us for the next Olympia Science Café.

When: 7:00 PM, Tuesday, 9 February 2016

Where:  Orca Books (509 East 4th Avenue, Olympia, Phone 360.352.0123)

Our February Topic Is Pragmatic trials:  Re-envisioning medical research to meet the need for high quality evidence

 

Randomized double-blind trials are the gold standard for determining causation and treatment efficacy in health research.  Ideally, all questions with the potential to substantially impact public health would be informed by such high quality evidence, but  this is impractical. Is there a way to address this? Randomized clinical trials, as traditionally implemented are expensive, time-consuming and often logistically challenging.   New approaches to designing and implementing clinical trials are needed to improve the generalizability and reduce the cost and the delays in getting these important answers.  In this talk, I will discuss some of motivation and elements of so-called pragmatic trials, some potential designs, associated assumptions and barriers.

 

About the Speaker:

Dr. Garnet Anderson, is Senior Vice President and Director of the Public Health Sciences Division of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Dr. Anderson received her Ph.D. in biostatistics from the University of Washington in 1989 and has been on the Public Health Sciences faculty in both the Biostatistics and the Cancer Prevention Programs since that time.  Her primary interests are in the design and analysis of randomized trials, women’s health and chronic disease prevention.   She is best known for her work with Dr. Ross Prentice in the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) where she is currently the Principal Investigator of the WHI Clinical Coordinating Center.  Dr. Anderson played a major role in the design, monitoring and analysis of the WHI clinical trials and was the lead statistician for the WHI hormone therapy trials.   Dr. Anderson is also the Associate Director for Cancer Control and Prevention of the SWOG (Southwest Oncology Group) Statistical Center (Dr. Michael LeBlanc, PI)  and an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Washington.  She has served as statistician for the SWOG Gynecology Committee and a member of NCI’s Steering Committee for gynecological cancers.  Dr. Anderson has held leadership roles in other multicenter groups including as Project Director and Biostatistics Core leader in the NCI-funded Pacific Ovarian Cancer Research Consortium SPORE (Dr. Nicole Urban, PI) and  a Principal Investigator  (with Dr. Andrea LaCroix) of the data coordinating center for an NIA-funded clinical trials network to study alternatives therapies for menopausal symptoms (MsFLASH).  She is also Principal Investigator for the WHI Cancer Survivor Cohort (joint with Drs. Bette Caan and Electra Paskett).  Dr. Anderson is also part of a scientific leadership team (with Drs. JoAnn Manson, MD, DrPH, and Howard Sesso, ScD, of Harvard and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston) conducting a five-year, large-scale randomized controlled trial (The COcoa Supplement and Multivitamins Outcomes Study – COSMOS) to test the effect of a concentrated cocoa extract and multivitamin supplements in reducing risks of CVD and cancer.   Dr. Anderson has authored over 160 articles and book chapters and has served on numerous national and international panels and review groups.

 

 

Next Month: Mima Mounds

 

Sincerely,

Dharshi Bopegedera, Ph. D.

Member of the Faculty (Chemistry)

The Evergreen State College

Olympia, WA 98505

 

Office: Lab I, 2006

Phone: (360) 867-6620

Fax: (360) 867 – 5430

Email: bopegedd@evergreen.edu