Faculty

Theodore R. Holford, Ph.D.

Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health
Division Head, Biostatistics
Laboratory Web Page

Professor Holford's research interests are in the development and application of statistical methods in public health and medicine which focuses on three areas: extending age-period-cohort models to the analysis of temporal trends in disease maps; developing models that can be used to develop strategies for controlling cancer; and the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to study the association between environmental exposures and disease risk.  His work on a lung cancer models is a part of the Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network (CISNET), which consists of a group of investigators at various institutions who are engaged in developing mathematical models for various cancer sites. Another focus of his research involves the development of methods for studying the effects of environmental exposures and disease risk using GIS. These applications include the effects of environmental exposures on asthma symptoms, and the prediction of areas that have habitats that are compatible with vectors for specific microbial diseases.

Curriculum Vitae

Education
Ph.D., Yale University, 1973

Awards and Honors

Wakeman Award for Research in the Neurosciences

Fellow, American College of Epidemiology

Fellow, American Statistical Association

Eleanor Roosevelt International Cancer Fellowship from the UICC (International Union against Cancer), 1981-1982

Courses Taught

BIS 511a GIS Applications in Epidemiology and Public Health

BIS 635b Topics in Statistical Epidemiology

Current Research Projects

Modeling Interventions for Lung Cancer Mortality (CISNET); Asthma Severity in Children and Fine Particle Composition; Environment, Gene and Testicular Cancer Risk; Spatial Risk Model for Ixodes Scapularis-bourne Borrelia; and Intervenable Host Leishmania (Viannia) Interactions.

Yale Affiliations

Professor, Department of Statistics

Director, Biostatistics Shared Resource of the Yale Comprehensive Cancer Center

Selected Publications

Zhang, Y., Holford, T.R., Leaderer, B., Zahm, S.H., Boyle, P., Zhu, Y., Wang, R., Zou, K., Zhang, B., Flynn, S., Han, J., and Zheng, T. Ultraviolet Radiation Exposure and Risk of Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma. American Journal of Epidemiology 165: 1255-1264, 2007.

Holford, T.R., Cronin, K.A., Mariotto, A.B., and Feuer, E.J. Changing Patterns in Breast Cancer Incidence Trends. Journal of the National Cancer Institute Monographs 36: 19-25, 2006.

Holford, T.R. Approaches to Fitting Age-period-cohort Models with Unequal Intervals. Statistics in Medicine 25: 997-993, 2006.

Holford, T.R., Ruaño, G., and Windemuth, A. Personalizing Public Health. Personalized Medicine 2(3): 239-249, 2005.

Brownstein, J.S., Skelly, D.K., Holford, T.R., and Fish, D. Forest Fragmentation Predicts Local Scale Heterogeneity of Lyme Disease Risk. Oecologia 146: 469-475, 2005.

Holford, T.R. Temporal Factors in Public Health Surveillance: Sorting Out Age, Period and Cohort Effects. In: Monitoring the Health of Populations: Statistical Methods and Principles for Public Health Surveillance, Brookmeyer, R. and Stroup, D. (Eds.)., Oxford University Press, Oxford, 99-126, 2004.

Brownstein, J.S., Holford, T.R., and Fish, D. A Climate-based Model Predicts the Spatial Distribution of the Lyme Disease Vector Ixodes scapularis in the United States. Environmental Health Perspectives 2003.

Holford, T.R., Multivariate Methods in Epidemiology. Oxford University Press, New York, 2002.