The Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, the Dr. John T. Macdonald Foundation Department of Human Genetics, and the John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics will host grand rounds on Wednesday, February 16 from 12 to 1 p.m. in the Broad-Bussel Auditorium, located on the first floor of the Clinical Research Building. Kathleen Ries Merikangas, chief of the Genetic Epidemiology Branch in the Intramural Research Program at the National Institute of Mental Health, will present “Challenges in Genetic Epidemiology of Neurospsychiatric Disorders.” For more information, please contact Jane Brooks at [email protected] or click here.

Michael LeBlanc, a member of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, will present “Assessing Interactions and Associations with Genetic Data in Clinical Trials” on Friday, February 4 at 11:30 a.m. at the Clinical Research Building, Room 988.

Development of targeted cancer therapies has paralleled new technology for enabling the identification of genetic components of disease at the cellular and molecular levels. These genomic measurements are expected to help identify new therapeutic targets and facilitate more effective selection of drugs appropriate for patients. An outgrowth of both targeted therapy and improved measures of tumor biology motivates the investigation of gene by interactions or subgroup effects. In this seminar, LeBlanc will provide an overview of recent proposals to assess statistical interactions in clinical trials data.

Hua Yun Chen, associate professor in the Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago, will present “Corrections for Case-Control Design in Secondary Trait Analysis” on Friday, January 28, at 2:15 p.m. at the Clinical Research Building, Room 988. For more information, call Michele Gomez at 305-243-6312.

The Department of Epidemiology and Public Health will host grand rounds on Wednesday, January 19 from 12 to 1 p.m. at Broad-Bussel Auditorium, Clinical Research Building, first floor. Mark Helfand, staff physician at Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center and professor of medicine and medical informatics and clinical epidemiology at Oregon Health and Science University School of Medicine, will present “Methodological Challenges for Comparative Effectiveness Research.” For more information, e-mail Jane Brooks at [email protected].

The Department of Epidemiology and Public Health will present grand rounds on Wednesday, December 15 from 12 to 1 p.m. at the Michael S. Gordon Center for Research in Medical Education, Broad-Bussel Auditorium, located on the first floor of the Clinical Research Building.

David O. Meltzer, associate professor in the Department of Medicine and an associated faculty member in the Harris School and the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, will speak on “Individual Learning by Doing and Social Network Effects in a Multicenter Study of Academic Hospitalists.” This research uses a novel natural experiment in which patients in six academic medical centers were assigned to hospitalist or traditional care. The study finds that physicians and physician experience affect the practice patterns of colleagues through house staff social network connections. Although there is growing recognition of the importance of social networks in individual behavior, this is the first study to apply this concept to a hospital setting. This research has important implications for diffusion of practice patterns as well as the role of hospitalists in patient care.