Appendix D
Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff
John Karl Scholz (Chair) is a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Previously, he was the deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis at the U.S. Department of the Treasury and senior staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisers. He has written extensively on the earned income tax credit and low-wage labor markets. He also writes on public policy and household saving, charitable contributions, and bankruptcy laws. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and was director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He received a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University.
F. Jay Breidt is professor and director of graduate education for the Department of Statistics at Colorado State University (CSU). Previously, he was on the faculty in the Department of Statistics at Iowa State University and a member of the survey section of the statistical laboratory, which had as a major focus design and estimation for large-scale environmental surveys, particularly the USDA’s National Resources Inventory. His research interests include time series, environmental monitoring, and survey sampling. He is an associate editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association and the Journal of Forecasting, and he currently chairs the American Statistical Association’s Committee on Energy Statistics. With colleagues at CSU, he
was recently awarded an EPA STAR grant for space-time aquatic resources modeling. He received a Ph.D. in statistics from Colorado State University.
Ronette Briefel is a senior fellow at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. Her research interests include national nutrition policy; survey research on the dietary food security, nutritional, and health status of the U.S. population; and dietary intake methodology. She has analyzed National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data on the dietary intake and nutritional status of low-income populations, including pregnant women and children participating in WIC and has conducted national program evaluations of the Summer Food Service Program and the Emergency Food Assistance Program. She earned a B.S. in nutrition from Pennsylvania State University and an M.P.H. in maternal and child health administration and a Dr.P.H. in epidemiology from the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health.
Jamie Casey (Research Associate) is a member of the staff of the Committee on National Statistics. She has worked on projects studying the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) eligibility, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), the role of Institutional Review Boards in social and behavioral research, and racial and ethnic disparities in health care. Previously, she worked for the National Center for Health Statistics. She received a B.A. degree in psychology from Goucher College.
Constance F. Citro (Staff Director) is director of the Committee on National Statistics. She is a former vice president and deputy director of Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., and was an American Statistical Association/National Science Foundation research fellow at the U.S. Census Bureau. She has served as study director for numerous projects, including the Panel to Review the 2000 Census, the Panel on Estimates of Poverty for Small Geographic Areas, the Panel on Poverty and Family Assistance, the Panel to Evaluate the Survey of Income and Program Participation, the Panel to Evaluate Microsimulation Models for Social Welfare Programs, and the Panel on Decennial Census Methodology. Her research has focused on the quality and accessibility of large, complex microdata files, as well as analysis related to income and poverty measurement. She is a fellow of the American Statistical Association. She received a B.A. degree from the Uni-
versity of Rochester and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in political science from Yale University.
William F. Eddy is professor of statistics at Carnegie Mellon University, and he also holds appointments in the School of Computer Science and the Department of Biological Sciences. He is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He is the chair of the Committee on National Statistics of the National Academies and was previously chair of the National Academies’ Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics. He received a Ph.D. degree in statistics from Yale University.
Andrew Gelman is a professor in the Department of Statistics and the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. He is the author of Bayesian Data Analysis and Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks, and more than 100 research articles. His research interests include Bayesian methods, statistical graphics and computation, sample surveys, and applications in public health and policy. His research has won the Heinz Eulau Award from the American Political Science Association and the Outstanding Statistical Application Award from the American Statistical Association. He is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
Alan R. Kristal is a professor in the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center at the University of Washington. His primary research interest is in nutritional epidemiology, including the etiologic relationships between diet and cancer and the implementation and evaluation of public health nutrition interventions. Current projects include studies on (1) diet, dietary supplements, and prostate cancer risk; (2) diet and neoplastic progression of Barrett’s esophagus; (3) low-fat diet and breast cancer survival; and (4) dietary supplement use and cancer risk. He is a member of several medical associations and societies, including the American Association for Cancer Research, the American Society for Clinical Nutrition, the American Society for Nutritional Sciences, and the Society for Epidemiologic Research. A recent article, “Serum selenium levels in relation to markers of neoplastic progression among persons with Barrett’s esophagus,” was featured in the May 2003 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Earl S. Pollack (Study Director) is a member of the staff of the Committee on National Statistics. Previously, he was chief of biometry at the National Cancer Institute and director of the Division of Biometry and Epidemiology at the National Institute of Mental Health. More recently, he was a research professor at the Biostatistics Center at George Washington University and served as statistician for the Center to Protect Workers Rights, the construction research arm of the AFL/CIO. His interests are in chronic disease epidemiology and in the analysis of observational data from large health and medical databases. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, the American College of Epidemiology, and the American Public Health Association. He received B.S. and M.A. degrees in statistics from the University of Minnesota and an Sc.D. in biostatistics from Harvard University.
Barry M. Popkin is a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina. His primary focus is on the nutrition transition around the world, particularly the demographic and economic determinants of diet, activity, and body composition trends, through the use of longitudinal analysis techniques. Popkin directs longitudinal surveys in China and Russia; his long-term Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey provides data comparable to those from the China Health and Nutrition Survey and is the official monitor of Russian economic reforms and their demographic, health, and nutritional effects. He is also involved in longitudinal research in South Africa and the Philippines, and is working with researchers in several other countries. He is a consultant to the World Bank, the U.N. Coordinating Committee on Nutrition, the Micronutrient Initiative, and the U.N. Children’s Fund. In 1998 he received the Kellogg Prize for Outstanding Research in International Nutrition from the Society for International Nutrition Research. He received a Ph.D. from Cornell University.
Laurian J. Unnevehr is a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research program is focused on the social welfare implications of food safety and diet and health linkages, including new products and new regulations. For 1993-1995 she was on leave from UIUC at the Economic Research Service of the USDA, where she worked on food safety issues. She is president-elect of the American Association for Agricultural Economics, and she received its Publication of Enduring Quality Award in 2004 for a path-breaking article on meat product demand. She is a member of the
editorial board of Food Policy and the editorial council of the Review of Agricultural Economics. She received a Ph.D. from the Food Research Institute at Stanford University.
Michele Ver Ploeg (Study Director) was a member of the staff of the Committee on National Statistics until October 2004. In addition to the study on Enhancing the Data Infrastructure in Support of Food and Nutrition Programs, Research, and Decision Making, she directed the panel study on Estimating WIC Eligibility and Participation. Her research interests include the effects of social policies on families and children, the outcomes of children who experience poverty and changes in family composition, and individuals’ education attainment choices. She received a B.A. in economics from Central College and a Ph.D. in policy analysis and management from Cornell University.
Walter Willett is professor of epidemiology and nutrition and chair of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School. He studied food science at Michigan State University, graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School, and received a Ph.D. in public health from the Harvard School of Public Health. He has focused much of his work over the last 25 years on the development of methods to study the effects of diet on the occurrence of major diseases, using both questionnaire and biochemical approaches. Starting in 1980, he applied those methods in the Nurses’ Health Studies I and II and the Health Professionals’ Follow-up Study. Together, these cohorts that include nearly 300,000 men and women with repeated dietary assessments are providing the most detailed U.S. information available on the long-term health consequences of food choices. His recent book for the general public, Eat, Drink and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating, has appeared on major bestseller lists.
