The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and the School of Public Health, along with the Department of Biostatistics and the Section on Statistical Genetics, announced that Dr. Janet Turk Wittes, president of Statistics Collaborative Inc., which she founded in 1990, will receive the Fifth Annual Janet L. Norwood Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Woman in the Statistical Sciences. The award ceremony, lecture by Dr. Wittes and reception will occur at the University of Alabama at Birmingham's Alys Stephens Center on Friday, October 13.

Dr. Wittes received her BA in mathematics from Radcliffe College, and her MA and PhD in statistics from Harvard University. She began her career in academe. Then, in 1983, she joined the Biostatistics Research Branch, National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute as its chief. Her research has focused on the design and analysis of randomized clinical trials. She is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Society for Clinical Trials. She is a past president of The International Biometric Society – Eastern North American Region (1995) and The Society for Clinical Trials (2001). From 1990 through 1995 she served as the editor-in-chief of Controlled Clinical Trials. She is a member of many Data and Safety Monitoring Boards (DSMBs) for randomized clinical trials sponsored by both industry and government. Her recently (2006) published book, coauthored with Dr. Michael Proschan and Dr. Gordon Lan, titled "Monitoring Clinical Trials: A Unified Approach," deals with methods for interim analysis of data.

For more information on the award, click here.