Presidential Keynote Address

Sander Greenland, Ph.D.

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The International Biometric Society is pleased to announce that the IBC2024 keynote speaker will be Sander Greenland, Emeritus Professor of Epidemiology and Statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"We are honored to have Dr. Greenland agree to serve as our keynote speaker for the 2024 IBC. I particularly look forward to his thoughts on the proper use of statistical methods in observational studies," said IBC Executive Director Peter Doherty.

Bio: Dr. Greenland received Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Mathematics and Master's and Doctoral degrees in Epidemiology from the University of California. As a leading contributor to epidemiologic theory and methodology, his focus has been the limitations and misuse of statistical methods in observational studies.  He has authored or co-authored dozens of book chapters and over 400 articles, in epidemiology, statistics, and medical journals, and co-authored the textbook Modern Epidemiology 2nd and 3rd edn. He has served on the editorial boards of numerous journals, and as an advisor to many agencies including the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control, the State of California, the National Academy of Sciences, and the World Health Organization. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and of the Royal Statistical Society, and has been an invited speaker at universities and conferences in statistics and epidemiology throughout the world. He has received honors from the Albert Einstein Medical College, the University of Aarhus Medical School, and the Food and Drug Administration for his work on statistical and epidemiologic methods for drug and device safety evaluation. 

"Toward restoring realism in statistical training and practice
Or, how applied statistics is broken and how we might rebuild it"


Cognitive biases are large and unavoidably hardwired into both individual and social
perceptions, yet are overlooked by most methodologic training. Basic statistics originated as a
cognitive aid for preventing hallucination of patterns in noise and for providing reliable
uncertainty assessments. But it spread in a form that encouraged creation of certainty from
ambiguity, which the research community embraced as a core methodology and cultural tradition.
To deal with this reality, we need to develop and teach methods for seeing and blocking cognitive
biases, as has been done for bias sources like confounding, mismeasurement, and P-selection.
This emergent psychosocial methodology should displace many fine points of traditional
mathematical statistics, which itself is a major source of cognitive biases.


Some background references:
Greenland S. 2017. The need for cognitive science in methodology. Am J Epidemiol 186, 639-
645. https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/186/6/639/3886035
Rafi Z, Greenland S. 2020. Semantic and cognitive tools to aid statistical science: replace
confidence and significance by compatibility and surprise. BMC Med Res Methodol 20, 244.
https://bmcmedresmethodol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12874-020-01105-9
Greenland S. 2022. The causal foundations of applied probability and statistics. Ch. 31 in
Dechter R, Halpern J, Geffner, H., eds. Probabilistic and Causal Inference: The Works of
Judea Pearl. ACM Books no. 36, 605-624, https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.02677