Program > Keynote and Plenary Speakers

Keynote Speaker

Seth Eisen, MD, MSc Seth Eisen, MD, MSc
Office of Research and Development (ORD)
Department of Veterans Affairs

Seth Eisen, MD, MSc, a rheumatologist and epidemiologist, is Special Operations Officer in the Office of Research and Development (ORD), Department of Veterans Affairs. From 2007 to 2012, Dr. Eisen served as Director, Health Services Research and Development Service, ORD. In this role, he developed major initiatives in healthcare informatics, health care genomics, pharmacovigilance, women Veterans' health, traumatic brain injury, health systems research, transformation of clinical research into practice, and comparative effectiveness research. Prior to moving to Washington, he was a Staff Physician at the St. Louis Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and a Professor of Internal Medicine and Psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. With his colleagues, he developed the Vietnam Era Twin (VET) Registry, a national cohort of 7400 male-male identical and fraternal Veteran twin pairs, which has been used to investigate genetic and environmental influences on a wide variety of physical and psychiatric health issues. Dr. Eisen has over 150 peer reviewed publications.
Sharon-Lise Normand, Ph.D. Sharon-Lise Normand, Ph.D.
Department of Health Care Policy
Harvard Medical School

Sharon-Lise Normand, Ph.D., is Professor of Health Care Policy (Biostatistics) in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School and Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health. Her research focuses on the development of statistical methods for health services and outcomes research, primarily using Bayesian approaches, including causal inference, provider profiling, item response theory, latent variables analyses, post-market surveillance, and evaluation of medical devices in randomized and non-randomized settings. She served on several task forces for the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology, was a consultant to the US Food and Drug Administration's Circulatory System Devices Advisory Panel after serving a four-year term on the panel, was a member of the Medicare Evidence Development and Coverage Advisory Committee, and is Director of Mass-DAC, a data coordinating center that monitors the quality of all adult cardiac surgeries and coronary interventions in all Massachusetts' acute care hospitals. Dr. Normand has served on several editorial boards including Biometrics, Statistics in Medicine, Health Services and Outcomes Research Methodology, Psychiatric Services, and Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes. She was the 2010 President of the Eastern North American Region of the International Biometrics Society and was the first Vice Chair of the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute's Methodology Committee (2010-2012). Dr. Normand earned her Ph.D. in Biostatistics from the University of Toronto, holds a Masters of Science as well as a Bachelor of Science degree in Statistics, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology, a Fellow of the American Heart Association, and an Associate of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons. In 2011, Dr. Normand was awarded the American Statistical Association Health Policy Statistics Section's Long Term Excellence Award; in 2012, the American Heart Association's Distinguished Scientist Award; and in 2013 elected to the Society for Research Synthesis Methodology.

Plenary Speaker

Robert Gibbons, Ph.D. Robert Gibbons, Ph.D.
Departments of Medicine and Health Studies
Director, Center for Health Statistics University of Chicago

Robert Gibbons received his doctorate in statistics and psychometrics from the University of Chicago in 1981. He spent the first 30 years of his career at the University of Illinois at Chicago (1981-2010) where he directed the Center for Health Statistics, a consortium of 15 statisticians working in both theoretical and applied areas of environmetrics, chemometrics, biometrics, and psychometrics. In 2010 Professor Gibbons joined the faculty of the University of Chicago where he is Professor of Biostatistics in the Departments of Health Studies, Medicine, and Psychiatry, and continues to direct the Center for Health Statistics. Support for his research includes numerous grants and contracts from the NIH, NIMH, ONR, NCI, and MacArthur foundation. Professor Gibbons is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He has authored more than 250 peer-reviewed scientific papers and five books. Professor Gibbons is a 2011 University of Chicago Pritzker Scholar, and the 2012 recipient of the Rema Lapouse Award for contributions to Psychiatric Epidemiology from the American Public Health Association.