Richard Horton

On November 2, 2009, Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet, will deliver the 2009 Gloyd Lecture, Two Concepts for Health: How to Radicalize the Global Response to Planetary Threats. The lecture will be presented at 5:30 pm in Hogness Auditorium, A-420 in Health Sciences.
During Horton's tenure, The Lancet has explored controversial issues such as the results of a 2006 study estimating the civilian death toll of the Iraq war at 655,000, the safety of genetically modified foods, and connections between autism and the MMR vaccine. The Lancet has been widely praised for highlighting health issues in the Third World and its scrutiny of the pharmaceutical industry.

Horton (BSc, MB, FRCP, FMedSci) was born in London and qualified in medicine from the University of Birmingham in 1986. In 1990, he joined The Lancet as an assistant editor and moved to New York as North American editor in 1993. Two years later he returned to the UK to become The Lancet's youngest ever Editor-in-Chief at 33.

Horton has a strong interest in issues of global health. He has been a medical columnist for The Observer and writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and New York Review of Books. A book about controversies in modern medicine, Second Opinion, was published in 2003.

Clarice Weinberg

On November 5, 2009, Clarice Weinberg will deliver the 2009 Breslow Lecture, Encountering the Generalized Linear Model in the Minefields of Epidemiology. The lecture will be presented at 3:30 pm in T-747, Health Sciences.

Weinberg, who earned her PhD in Biomathematics at the UW in 1980, is Chief of the Biostatistics Branch of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences. Her research has focused on the development of improved methods for design and analysis in epidemiologic studies. She is also interested in the combined roles of genetics and the environment in complex health problems such as birth defects, heart diseases, neurodegenerative disease, and cancer.

Weinberg is currently collaborating with Dale Sandler, Chief of NIEHS' Epidemiology Branch, in a long-term, national study of breast cancer called the Sister Study. The study is following 50,000 women , ages 35-74, who have never had breast cancer themselves but who have a biological sister diagnosed with the disease.
Weinberg and her colleagues are also designing a follow-up study, called the Two Sister Study, which will follow the 1,600 Sister Study families in which the sister who had breast cancer was (1) recently diagnosed and (2) under the age of 50 at diagnosis. The Two Sister Study will look at DNA, household dust samples, and extensive questionnaire data to compare environmental and genetic factors in the development of young-onset breast cancer.

Weinberg received the 2005 Nathan Mantel Award for lifetime contributions to statistics in epidemiology and the Fourth Annual Janet L. Norwood Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Woman in the Statistical Sciences.