ORGANIZATION AND RESOURCES

 

The Director is responsible for all operational aspects of the Facility and reports to the Dean of the College of Medicine.  The staff will assist in estimating costs and preparing budgets prior to initiation of the effort.  All budget estimates require approval of the Director.

 

The Faculty of the Facility includes Biostatisticians, Epidemiologists and Behavioral Scientists, some of who are affiliated with the Statistics Program of the College of Engineering and Mathematics or other academic units.  The Statistics Program offers a B.S. and M.S. degree in Statistics and Biostatistics.

 

The Facility biostatistical staff consists of two Ph.D. Biostatisticians, one Post-Doctoral Associate, several M.S. Biostatisticians and three Data Analysts. Data Analysts carry out data processing and analysis as well as assist in the development of databases.

 

The Facility survey research support staff maintains and updates various sampling frame materials for the state and other regions of the U.S., recruits and trains interviewers, assists in the development and pretesting of questionnaires, supervises field staff and performs and/or supervises coding and other data entry operations.  Mail and telephone surveys are also supervised and conducted by the survey research support staff.

 

The Facility has computing capabilities on multiple platforms including WINDOWS, MAC, LINUX, UNIX, and DOS.  These systems can be used for statistical programming and analysis via standard statistical software such as SAS (Statistical Analysis System), BMDP (Biomedical statistical analysis software), or SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences), SAGE (Statistical Analysis for Genetic Epidemiology), and EGRET (software for statistical analysis of epidemiological data). The Academic Computer Center’s UNIX cluster mainframe (ZOO) provides access to additional computing power and storage capacity.  Several high-level programming languages such as C++, C, PASCAL, FORTRAN, COBOL, and BASIC are available for simulation studies along with statistical algorithms available through the International Mathematical and Statistical Library (IMSL). In addition, the Facility maintains a library of specialized statistical software programs designed for biomedical research data. 

 

The Facility also includes a Novell LAN, 12-station Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) system with primary and back-up servers.

 

Members of the Facility have expertise in the creation and implementation of computer telephony applications (also referred to as Interactive Voice Response or IVR). These systems allow automated interviews, remote data entry, subject registration and randomization on a 24-hour basis.  The applications are run from a dedicated Pentium PC with four phone lines.

 

In addition to formal statistical analyses, the Facility offers a number of other services using special software tools.  These include (1) image processing and analysis; (2) data translation from one application format to another (e.g. spreadsheet to DBASE, SPSS, SAS, etc.); (3) curve fitting and nonlinear estimation for compartmental models; (4) sophisticated plots or charts; (5) database/application development.