“NIH Biostatistics and the Reformation of Modern Medicine,” Christopher Phillips, PhD; Professor and Department Head, History; Carnegie Mellon University
Wednesday, September 25, 2024; 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm; Masur Auditorium
Dr. Christopher Phillips will deliver the second annual Victoria A. Harden Lecture in NIH History from noon until 1:00 pm in Masur, as part of the NIH Research Festival.
Lecture overview: Between 1930 and 1980, statistical concepts became essential for clinicians and medical researchers alike. At the heart of this transformation was a group of statisticians at NIH. Primarily trained in economics and demography, this group introduced measures that revolutionized how researchers establish the causes of disease and the effectiveness of purported treatments. The group also played a key role in the transformation of statistics more broadly, showing the importance of a close connection between theory and application and establishing the field as far more open to underrepresented groups long denied places in academic mathematics. This talk helps situate the rise of biostatistics as one of the most important historical developments of the recent past, particularly in its links to evidence-based, personalized- and precision-medicine.
Christopher Phillips is Professor of History in Carnegie Mellon University’s History Department, where he is also Department Head. An historian of science and 20th-century America, his Harden Lecture derives from his current research on the history of statistics in medicine, with special focus on NIH biostatisticians. His books include The New Math: A Political History (Chicago, 2015); and Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball (Princeton, 2019). He is also the author of “Precision Medicine and its Imprecise History,” [Harvard Data Science Review (2020)], which examines precision medicine in general, and the All of Us Research Program in particular, in the context of the history of biostatics and genetics.
Dr. Phillips received his PhD in History of Science from Harvard University in 2011.
Phillips will be introduced by Dean Follmann, PhD; Chief, Biostatistics Research Branch at NIAID. A joint reception will be held in the NIH Library, taking place between the Chen Lecture (10:00–11:00 am; also in Masur) and this Harden Lecture. Please join us!
Send requests for reasonable accommodations to Kim Pelis at least one week prior to the event to allow time for coordination.
The annual Harden Lecture honors ONHM’s founding director, Dr. Victoria Harden. Dr. Harden directed the office from its creation in 1986 until her retirement in 2006. Part of “History & Context: The ONHM Seminar Series,” the Harden Lecture spotlights an important topic in NIH’s storied history. Victoria Harden currently serves as an ONHM Special Volunteer.
Event Details
“NIH Biostatistics and the Reformation of Modern Medicine”
Christopher Phillips, PhD; Professor and Department Head, History; Carnegie Mellon University
Wednesday, September 25, 2024; noon to 1:00pm; Masur Auditorium
ONHM was saddened to learn of the recent passing of Caroline Hannaway, PhD., an historian and editor in our office from 1992 until 2008. She died in Baltimore, Maryland on March 14, 2024. ONHM owes her an enduring debt of gratitude for her many contributions to this office, including to our oral history collection; to the history HIV/AIDS, for which she was jointly supported by the NIH Office of AIDS Research; and to the history of NIH itself. As ONHM’s Founding Director, Dr. Victoria Harden, remarked:
Caroline was my historical colleague and superb editor who first contributed to ONHM’s efforts to document NIH’s response to HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and ‘90s. She then became the editor who reviewed and improved every scholarly book and article manuscript, exhibit script, and website text for the office.
Dr. Hannaway was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia. She received her PhD (1974) at the Johns Hopkins Institute of the History of Medicine, where she went on to become an assistant professor and also, from 1983 to 1990, Editor of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. Later, she was Interim and then Associate Editor of the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (2005 to 2013). In 2015, she received the American Association for the History of Medicine’s Genevieve Miller Lifetime Achievement Award.
