Dale Plummer
Mgr Application Development, Department of Biostatistics
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine

Dale Plummer has been a statistical programmer, systems analyst, web developer, database analyst, and manager for over 30 years.

He has been involved in several randomized clinical trials including a study comparing surgery vs medical interventions for renal hypertension, a trial of an attenuated flu vaccine, a study related to Ibuprofen treatment in sepsis patients in the ICU, and others. He is the principal software developer for the Nashville Breast Studies which is concerned with identifying breast cancer risk factors in women with a history of benign breast disease. Over the years a database of over 17,000 women treated for benign breast disease at Nashville hospitals has been developed. Several research projects have made use of the NBS data.

Dale is the primary software developer for the “PS: Power and Sample Size” program. PS is an interactive program for performing power and sample size calculations that may be downloaded for free. It has been downloaded thousands of times and has proven to be a useful tool for sample size and power calculation for study design, grant applications, and teaching.