Reproductive System & Sexual Disorders: Current Research
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Wacholder S

Biography

Dr. Wacholder received a Ph.D. in Biomathematics from the University of Washington in 1982. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and an elected member of the American Epidemiological Society. Dr. Wacholder plays a major role in several DCEG-sponsored research areas. He has been the lead statistician in the very successful DCEG research program in human papillomavirus (HPV) and its consequences since the early 1990’s. He began working in genetic epidemiology with the Washington Ashkenazi Study, for which he invented kin-cohort analysis. He was a statistical initiator of the Cancer Genetic Markers of Susceptibility (CGEMS) from its inception, and a leader of the CGEMS genome-wide association (GWA) studies of cancers of the breast and the prostate. He maintains his interest in childhood cancers from his work on electromagnetic fields and childhood acute lymphocytic leukemia, and is now involved in GWAS of osteogenic sarcoma and Ewing sarcoma, rarer cancers that target adolescents and young adults. He is a collaborator on large, comprehensive case-control studies of lung cancer and renal cell cancer. In addition, Dr. Wacholder has made major contributions to a variety of methodologic areas: design of case-control studies, including a series of papers on choosing controls; population stratification in association studies of the effects of genetic variants; and a formal method for evaluating the chance that a reported positive finding is a false positive by incorporating external information.  He is editor emeritus of Epidemiology, senior editor for statistical methods and models at Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention, statistical editor at JNCI and an associate editor at American Journal of Epidemiology.

Research Interest

Dr. Wacholder’s research agenda is driven by study design, analysis and interpretation issues facing scientists in DCEG and elsewhere who are trying to understand the causes of cancer and the means for its prevention. In addition, much of his independent and collaborative work involves molecular epidemiology.

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