William D. Dupont, Ph.D., F.A.S.A. Professor of Biostatistics, Preventive Medicine and Health Policy
Email: william.dupont@vumc.org Phone: (615) 343-4100 Fax: (615) 343-4924 Assistant: Cierra Streeter Vanderbilt University School of Medicine Department of Biostatistics Suite 1100, Room 11124 2525 West End Avenue Nashville, TN 37203-8354

Curriculum Vitae:

Research Interests

• Epidemiology
• Breast Disease
• Cancer
• Genetics
• Hormonal Replacement Therapy
• Screening
• Power and Sample Calculations
• Data Management
• Data Quality Assurance
• Clinical Trials
• Stopping Rules
• Foundations of Statistical Inference
• Likelihood methods

Molecular Epidemiology of Breast Disease

Dr. Dupont's primary research interest is in the molecular epidemiology of breast cancer. The primary focus of this research is to determine molecular and histologic markers of elevated breast cancer risk in women who have undergone biopsy revealing benign breast disease. He and his collaborators, Drs. David L. Page, Jeffrey R. Smith, Fritz F. Parl, Melinda Sanders, Carlos Arteaga, and Harold L. Moses, are assembling a cohort of 17,000 women who had benign breast biopsies in Nashville over the past four decades. Paraffin embedded biopsy blocks are available on most of these women, and information on breast cancer outcome and other risk factors is being obtained on the overwhelming majority of these patients who are willing to participate in this research. To date, they have been very successful in identifying histologic risk factors for breast cancer in this cohort. Reports on their breast cancer research related to hormonal replacement therapy and transforming growth factor beta are given elsewhere on this web site.

Other Research Interests

Dr. Dupont's other research interests include the development of statistical methods for sample size estimation and power calculations, the estimation of animal abundance, and the philosophical foundations of statistical inference.

Book

Dupont WD: Statistical Modeling for Biomedical Researchers, 2nd Edition. Cambridge University Press. 2008.

Software

PS: Power and Sample Size Calculation

PS is an interactive program for performing power and sample size calculations. It can be used for studies with dichotomous, continuous, or survival response measures. The alternative hypothesis of interest may be specified either in terms of differing response rates, means, or survival times, or in terms of relative risks or odds ratios. Studies with dichotomous or continuous outcomes may involve either a matched or independent study design. The program can determine the sample size needed to detect a specified alternative hypothesis with the required power, the power with which a specific alternative hypothesis can be detected with a given sample size, or the specific alternative hypotheses that can be detected with a given power and sample size.

The PS program can produce graphs to explore the relationships between power, sample size and detectable alternative hypotheses. It is often helpful to hold one of these variables constant and plot the other two against each other. The program can generate graphs of sample size versus power for a specific alternative hypothesis, sample size versus detectable alternative hypotheses for a specified power, or power versus detectable alternative hypotheses for a specified sample size. Linear or logarithmic axes may be used for either axes. Multiple curves can be plotted on a single graphic. To download a free copy of this program for Windows computers click here. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS_Power_and_Sample_Size.

Hazard ratio and survival calculator based on tumor mutation burden, age, stage and grade

This is a RStudio Shiny app that estimates hazard ratios and survival plots using data from the Pan-Cancer Atlas. Click here for more information.

Density distribution sunflower plots

These plots are useful for displaying bivariate data whose density is too great for conventional scatter plots to be effective. This software was originally written and submitted as a user contributed add-on for the Stata statistical software product. The Stata Corporation subsequently incorporated sunflower plots as a standard part of Stata. The file sunflower_example.do is a Stata program that uses the sunflower technique to display high density data.

• Dupont WD and Plummer WD: Density distribution sunflower plots. Journal of Statistical Software, 2003; 8:(3)1-5. Posted at http://www.jstatsoft.org/index.php?vol=8. Accessed May 15, 2003. See also Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 2003;12:247.
• StataCorp. 2003. Stata Statistical Software: Release 8.0. College Station, TX: StataCorp LP.

A presentation about this software was made at the North American Stata Users' Group Meetings 2004. An annotated PowerPoint file used in that presentation is available for download.

Click here for publications and other academic activities.

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