Biography

Dr. Gail received an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1968 and a Ph.D. in statistics from George Washington University in 1977. He joined NCI in 1969, and served as chief of the Biostatistics Branch from 1994 to 2008. Dr. Gail is a Fellow and former President of the American Statistical Association, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, and an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He has received the Spiegelman Gold Medal for Health Statistics, the Snedecor Award for applied statistical research, the Howard Temin Award for AIDS Research, the NIH Director's Award, and the PHS Distinguished Service Medal.

Research Interests

• Developing statistical methods for epidemiologic studies, including intervention trials and genetic epidemiologic studies
• Modeling absolute risk of disease, including breast cancer risk projection
• Gastric cancer etiology, including an intervention trial to reduce the prevalence of advanced precancerous gastric lesions in Shandong Province, China

Keywords

group randomized trials, breast cancer, gastric cancer, absolute risk, attributable risk, genetic epidemiology, genetic risk

Selected Publications

• Chen JB, Ayyagari R, Chatterjee N, Pee DY, Schairer C, Byrne C, Benichou J, Gail MH. Breast cancer relative risk estimates from case-control and cohort designs with missing data on mammographic density. J Am Stat Assoc 2008;103:976-988.
• Gail MH. Probability Discriminatory accuracy from single-nucleotide polymorphisms in models to predict breast cancer risk. JNCI 2008;100:1037-41.
• Gail MH, Pfeiffer RM, Wheeler W, Pee D. Probability that a Two-Stage Genome-Wide Association Study will Detect a Disease-Associated SNP and Implications for Multistage Designs. Ann Hum Genet 2008;72:812-20.
• Gail MH, Costantino JP, Pee D, Bondy M, Newman L, Selvan M, Anderson GL, Malone KE, Marchbanks PA, McCaskill-Stevens W, Norman SA, Simon MS, Spirtas R, Ursin G, Bernstein L. Projecting individualized absolute invasive breast cancer risk in African American women. JNCI 2007 Dec 5;99:1782-92.
• Flegal KM, Graubard BI, Williamson DF, Gail MH. Cause-specific excess deaths associated with underweight, overweight, and obesity. JAMA 2007 Nov 7;298:2028-37.
• Gail MH, Pfeiffer RM, Wheeler W, Pee D. Probability of detecting disease-associated single nucleotide polymorphisms in case-control genome-wide association studies. BiostatisticsBiostatistics 2008;9:201-15.li>
• Gail MH, Pfeiffer RM, Brown LM, Zhang L, Ma JL, Pan KF, Liu WD, You WC. Garlic, vitamin, and antibiotic treatment for Helicobacter pylori: a randomized factorial controlled trial (letter). Helicobacter 2007;12:575-578.
• Graubard BI, Flegal KM, Williamson DF , Gail MH. Estimation of attributable number of deaths and standard errors from simple and complex sampled cohorts. Statistics in Medicine, 2007; 26: 2639-2649.
• You WC, Brown LM, Zhang L, Li JY, Jin ML, Chang YS, Ma JL, Pan KF, Liu WD, Hu Y, Crystal-Mansour S, Pee D, Blot WJ, Fraumeni JF Jr, Xu GW, Gail MH. Randomized double-blind factorial trial of three treatments to reduce the prevalence of precancerous gastric lesions. J Natl Cancer Inst 2006;98:974-978.
• Chatterjee N, Kalaylioglu Z, Shih JH, Gail MH. Case-control and case-only designs with genotype and family history data: estimating relative risk, residual familial aggregation, and cumulative risk. Biometrics 2006;62:36-48.
• Gail MH, Pfeiffer RM. On criteria for evaluating models of absolute risk. Biostatistics 2005;6(2):227-239.
• Flegal KM, Graubard BI, Williamson DF, Gail MH. Excess deaths associated with underweight, overweight, and obesity. JAMA 2005;293(15):1861-1867.
• Li Z, Gastwirth JL and Gail MH. Power and related statistical properties of conditional likelihood score tests for association studies in nuclear families with parental genotypes. Ann Hum Genet 2005;69:296-314.

Collaborators

DCEG Collaborators

• Linda Brown, Dr.P.H.; Nilanjan Chatterjee, Ph.D.; Susan Devesa, Ph.D.;Thomas Fears, Ph.D.; Mark H. Greene, M.D.; Gloria Gridley, M.S.; Ruth Pfeiffer, Ph.D.; Catherine Schairer, Ph.D.

Other NCI Collaborators

• Lin Clegg, Ph.D.; Rocky Feuer, Ph.D.

Other Scientific Collaborators

• Jacques Benichou, M.D., Ph.D, University of Rouen Medical School, Rouen, France
• Celia Byrne, Ph.D., Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA
• Raymond Carroll, Ph.D., Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
• Joseph Costantino, Ph.D., Univ. of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
• Joseph Gastwirth, Ph.D., George Washington University, Washington, DC
• Laurence Freedman, Ph.D., Bar IIan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
• Zongtang Sun, M.D., Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Beijing, China
• Hans van Houwelingen, Ph.D., Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
• Wei Cheng You, M.D., Beijing Institute of Cancer Research, Beijing, China
• Zhaohai Li, George Washington University, Washington, DC
• Hongyu Zhao, Ph.D., Yale University, New Haven, CT