Statistics

Office: 227 Rhodes

Phone: 607.255.9131

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Fax: 607.255.9129

Bruce Turnbull earned his B.A. in 1967 from Cambridge, England. After receiving his doctoral degree in 1971 from Cornell University, Professor Turnbull was a visiting faculty member at Stanford University with joint appointments in the Department of Statistics and the School of Medicine. In 1972 he was appointed lecturer at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, and concurrently a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. He joined the Cornell faculty in 1976. From 2000 to 2002 he served as Chair of the Department of Statistical Science at Cornell and previously he was Director of the Statistics Center.

Turnbull’s research interest concerns the design and analysis of experiments for determining the reliability and performance of a system. The system can be either a physical or biological one, so there are applications to reliability and quality control in engineering as well as clinical and animal trials in biomedicine. Several topics in this area are being explored. These include: efficient designs for quality monitoring of laboratory work; nonparametric performance measures for assessment of diagnostic indicators; failure time analysis when treatment effect may be lagged; statistical design and analysis of sequential experiments, in particular interim monitoring plans for clinical trials; accelerated life tests with concomitant information; study of marker processes as indicators of degradation or failure. A secondary area of research is concerned with the analysis of spatial point process data; in particular the detection of presence or absence clustering of events. Some applications have included: incidence of leukemia in an Upstate New York region in relation to sites of listed toxic waste dumps; incidence of childhood leukemias in Sweden in relation to locations of nuclear power plant facilities.

Select Publications

Jennison, C. and Turnbull, B.W. (2000). Group Sequential Methods with Applications to Clinical Trials. Chapman and Hall/CRC, Boca Raton and London, 390pp.

“Mid-course sample size modification in clinical trials based on the observed treatment effect”. Statistics in Medicine 22, 971 - 993 (2003). (With C. Jennison)

“Likelihood inference for clustered exchangeable binary data with varying cluster sizes”. Biometrics 59, 18 -24 (2002). (With C. Stefanescu).

“Some applications of indirect inference to longitudinal and repeated events data”. In: Proceedings of the Second Seattle Symposium in Biostatistics: Analysis of Correlated Data, (Eds. Danyu Lin and Patrick Heagerty). Lecture Notes in Statistics. Springer, New York. ( 2002). (With W. Jiang)

“A latent class mixed model for analyzing biomarker trajectories in longitudinal data with irregularly scheduled observations”. Statistics in Medicine, 19, 1303 - 1318 (2000). (With H. Lin, C.E. McCulloch, E.H. Slate, and L.C. Clark)

“Statistical Models for Longitudinal Biomarkers of Disease Onset”. Statistics in Medicine 19, 617 - 637 (2000). (With E.H. Slate)

“Semiparametric regression models for repeated events with random effects and measurement error”. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 94, 111 - 124 (1999). (With W. Jiang and L.C. Clark)

Professional Activities

NIH Data and Safety Monitoring Committees for several major national and international clinical trials for the prevention of cancer, heart disease and AIDS

Associate Editor of Statistics in Medicine

Royal Statistical Society

American Statistical Association

Biometric Society Institute of Mathematical Statistics

Awards and Recognition

American Statistical Association Fellow, 1985

Snedecor Memorial Award, American Statistical Association, 1979