Colleagues

Ted Colton, ScD
Professor, Chair Emeritus, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Boston University School of Public Health

Dr. Colton received his doctorate in biostatistics from Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. His nearly 50-year career as a biostatistician/epidemiologist in medical and health research has been in the academic sector with faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School, Dartmouth Medical School and Boston University School of Public Health where he is currently Professor and Chair Emeritus of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. His bibliography of authored and co-authored papers in peer reviewed publications numbers more than 125.

He authored the widely-used textbook, Statistics in Medicine, and has been co-editor-in-chief of the massive reference work, the Encyclopedia of Biostatistics, as well as co-editor-in-chief of one of the Encyclopedia’s major ‘spinoff’ volumes, Biostatistics in Clinical Trials. He is one of the founding editors of the journal, Statistics in Medicine, and has served on numerous Editorial Boards for professional journals including the New England Journal of Medicine.

Over the span of his career, he has served as Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator for numerous research studies including clinical trials and observational epidemiologic investigations. He has also served on numerous Data and Safety Monitoring Boards for multicenter clinical trials sponsored both by industry and by government (the National Institutes of Health). In particular, Dr. Colton has deep experience in ophthalmology, which includes serving as course director for ‘Clinical Vision Research: Epidemiologic and Biostatistical Approaches’ – a 3-day CME course sponsored by the National Eye Institute and held in Florida immediately prior to the ARVO meetings, Member of the DSMB for the Retisert clinical trials in uveitis, sponsored by Bausch & Lomb and statistical reviewer for Retina and for Journal of AAPOS.

His government service includes appointment to numerous peer-review panels for the National Institutes of Health as well as for other federal agencies, a national advisory committee to the Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as other national committees for the Department of Health and Human Services. He has also served a term as a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Cancer Institute.

His memberships in professional societies include the Society for Clinical Trials, the International Society for Clinical Biostatistics, the Society for Epidemiologic Research, the American Epidemiological Society and the following societies in which he has been named Fellow: the American Statistical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American College of Epidemiology and the American Public Health Association (where he has also received an award from the Statistics Section for his contributions in statistics).

Dr. Turnbull received his doctorate from Boston University with a concentration in Biostatistics and Experimental Design. He then completed a Charles Dana Human Research post-doctoral fellowship at Tufts/New England Medical Center and later worked for Squibb Pharmaceuticals. Barry has served as a consultant for numerous pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies while Associate Director of Biostatistics for a Parexel, a Boston based Clinical Research Organization (CRO).

Dr. Turnbull was Director of Biostatistics and Data Management for two Boston based biotechnology companies, Alkermes and Idera Pharmaceuticals and was the founding chair of the Biostatistics and Data Management Committee for the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council.

More recently, Dr. Turnbull was Vice President of Biostatistics and Clinical Data Systems for AAI Pharma and Vice President of Biometrics for BattelleCRO, a Boston based clinical trials consulting firm.

David Kaufman, ScD
Professor of Epidemiology, Boston University School of Public Health

David Kaufman is Professor of Epidemiology at the Boston University School of Public Health. He obtained his M.S. and Sc.D. in Epidemiology from Harvard School of Public Health. In 1975 he joined the newly created Drug Epidemiology Unit (now the Slone Epidemiology Center) as a Research Associate.

His early career as an epidemiologist at the DEU was primarily spent in studies of drugs and other factors in relation to cancer, heart disease, and various other conditions. Together with Drs. Slone, Shapiro, and Lynn Rosenberg, he participated in the development of Case-Control Surveillance. In the 1980s, Dr. Kaufman was co-investigator of the International Agranulocytosis and Aplastic Anemia Study, a pioneering effort in the evaluation of these extremely rare but often drug-induced blood dyscrasias that was conducted in seven countries with several hundred cases enrolled. He has directed studies of aplastic anemia in Thailand and the United States. The Thai study is the largest epidemiological investigation of aplastic anemia that has been conducted, with over 500 cases and 2200 controls. Dr. Kaufman pursued his interest in rare drug induced diseases as principal investigator of an international study of Stevens-Johnson syndrome and toxic epidermal necrolysis conducted in four countries in Europe, and a study of anaphylaxis conducted in Spain, Hungary, India, and Sweden.

Other major activities have included an international study of analgesics in relation to upper gastrointestinal bleeding and the National Analgesic Nephropathy Study, a multicenter study of end stage renal disease patients in three regions of the U.S. Dr. Kaufman worked closely with Allen Mitchell in the implementation of the Slone Survey, a U.S. population-based survey of medication use. He was principal investigator of a recently completed study that documented an inverse relationship between Oxalobacter formigenes, an oxalate metabolizing bacterium found in the colons of about 40% of the normal population, and calcium oxalate kidney stones. Dr. Kaufman currently directs the Patient Registries at Slone: Myeloma and MDS, a nationwide effort that follows patients with the two diseases through the course of their illness. He was Assistant Director of the Slone Epidemiology Unit from 1986 to 1997, and has been Associate Director since 1998.