Jon Wakefield
Professor, Statistics and Biostatistics
University of Washington
Tel: 206-543-6774 Box: 354322
website
CSDE Committees: Executive Committee Member and Training Committee Member
CSDE Research Areas:
- Demographic Measurements and Methods
- Health of People and Populations
Jonathan Wakefield’s primary research area is in the development of methods for spatial epidemiology with a particular interest in sources of, and methods for the removal of, ecological bias. He studies Bayesian data analysis, statistical methods in epidemiology, spatial epidemiology, and pharmacodynamic models. This interest began when he was the head of the Statistics group within the Small Area Health Statistics Unit at Imperial College. This government funded unit carried out investigations using routinely collected cancer data in the United Kingdom, primarily to determine the role of the environment. Wakefield has worked in study design with a series of papers developing a case-control within ecological design which is both powerful and removes ecological bias via the judicial choice of cases and controls. In a similar vein, two-phase methods have also been applied in the spatial context. A different endeavor is cluster detection (surveillance) with Wakefield and Albert Kim (a recent graduate student in the Statistics department) developing a Bayesian method that overcomes many of the drawbacks of frequentist methods (multiple testing and inability to discuss more than one cluster in a dataset). More recently, Wakefield has been working on infectious disease data, specifically data on malaria and hand, foot and mouth disease. The website http://faculty.washington.edu/jonno/spatialepi.html contains details on Wakefield’s work in spatial epidemiology.