Title
Professor of Public Health, Division of Biostatistics and Professor of Statistics

Department
School of Public Health


Faculty URL
http://sph.berkeley.edu/mark-van-der-laan

Email
laan@stat.berkeley.edu

Phone
(510) 643-9866

Fax
(510) 643-5163


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Research Expertise and Interest
statistics, computational biology and genomics, censored data and survival analysis, medical research, inference in longitudinal studies

Research Description
Mark van der Laan's research interests include computational biology, survival analysis, censored data, semiparametric models and causal inference. Details about Mark's education, experience, and publications can be found in his CV. Mark came to UC Berkeley from the Netherlands' University of Utrecht, where he studied mathematics (1985-1990) and obtained his Ph.D. (1993). He completed his thesis, "Efficient and inefficient estimation in semiparametric models," under the guidance of Prof. Richard D. Gill. In 1994, Mark was a Neyman Visiting Professor in the Statistics Department at UC Berkeley. Subsequently, he accepted a tenure track position in the Division of Biostatistics, School of Public Health at Berkeley, and became an Associate Professor in Biostatistics in July 1997. By July 2000, Mark was a Professor in Biostatistics and Statistics. Having taught introductory courses in Biostatistics for Public Health students, he currently teaches classes on censored data, survival analysis, causal inference, and statistical methods in genomics.
He acted as the Associate Editor for Biometrics, Lifetime Data Models, and is currently Associate Editor of 20 Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, the Annals of Statistics, Journal of Statistical Methods in Molecular Biology, and he is one of the founding editors of the new International Journal in Biostatistics.He has been Vice-President of the Bay-Area Chapter of the American Statistical Association.
Several grants have been awarded to Mark, including an NIH FIRST Award research grant for the period 1996-2001 to work on "Locally Efficient Estimation in Censored Data Models"; an NIAID grant for 1999-2002 to develop a unified methodology for censored data and causal inference; 3 year grant he received in March 2001 from the Life Science Informatics Institute and its industrial partner, biotech company Chiron, to create statistical methods for data structures involving microarray data on complete (human) genomes and an NIH grant on 20 ‘Data Adaptive Estimation in Epidemiology and Genomics''. Mark received the 2004 Mortimer Spiegelman Award. The Mortimer Spiegelman Award was established in 1969 by his family and is awarded annually to a young statistician for outstanding contributions in health statistics. It is presented by the Statistics Section of the American Public Health Association (APHA). Mark and his wife, Martine, have a daughter, Laura, and two sons, Lars and Robin, whom you can visit at his personal home page. His hobbies are statistics, tennis, chess, sparsely running marathons, and experiencing nature.