Good News

Linda, Robert, and Aixiang all are making steady progress in recovering from the flood. Many thanks to all department members who have helped with the cleaning and re-building.

PEOPLE

Chris Fonnesbeck, PhD, has joined the department as an instructor in biostatistics. On June 21^st, Sarah Fletcher will join us as biostatistician I. On August 1^st, David Ashfartous, PhD, will join as research associate professor.

Meridith Blevins and Li Wang have been promoted to biostatistician III, effective June 1^st.

SERVICE

Frank has set aside Mondays at 3:00 PM for office hours dedicated to technical questions (related to computing, operating systems, statistical analysis, etc.). Please take advantage of this opportunity to improve your skills and to help Frank be aware of any technical frustrations you may have!

QUALITY

Judith Swan, associate director for writing in science and engineering at Princeton University, will visit Vanderbilt on June 15^th and 16^th to lead three half-day workshops on scientific writing.

Faculty: please be certain to complete all required training and activities to remain in compliance with institutional and federal policies. For additional information on required training, please visit http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/compliance. For a snapshot of your compliance status, please visit https://medapps.mc.vanderbilt.edu/foto/.

Frank encourages all department members to make use of the web calendar, especially to note extended periods out of the office, such as summer vacations.

The publications committee has developed a metric for evaluating the department’s productivity in publishing papers in high-impact journals, as follows: each publication by a member of our department will be assigned a score according to the impact factor of the journal in which the paper was published; for papers with a department member as first author, the publication score will be equal to the impact factor multiplied by 10; for non-first author papers, the score will be equal to the impact factor. Each year, all scores will be summed, and this sum will be our publication metric. The goal is to have a metric that we can show the dean each year to demonstrate that we are producing high-quality science.

GROWTH & FINANCE

Jeffrey Blume and Steven Chen each submitted an R01 proposal for the June deadline.

Frank and Linda have prepared next year’s operating budget; however, their meeting with John Manning and Susan Wente to discuss the base allocation budget has been postponed. They hope to meet with SOM leadership soon to finalize the FY11 numbers.

INNOVATION

Dan Byrne, Jeffrey Blume, Lily Wang, Chang Yu, Jonathan Schildcrout, Linda, and Frank have formed a strategic planning committee to develop departmental pillar goals with an emphasis on innovation for review by Dean Balser next month.

Best regards,
CQI Communications Team
Frank Harrell, Yu Shyr, Dan Byrne, Linda Stewart, Tatsuki Koyama, and Lynne Berry

-- JohnBock - 01 Apr 2011