WALTER W. PIEGORSCH

UNCERTAINTY QUANTIFICATION GROUP


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My research centers on modeling and analysis for environmental data, with emphasis on environmental hazards and risk assessment. I coordinate these interests with research to translate quantitative risk-analytic methodologies in public health, including geo-spatially referenced disaster informatics; multiple/simultaneous inferences for toxicological and genetic endpoints; and the historical development of statistical thought as prompted by problems in the biological and environmental sciences.

Recent work in quantitative risk assessment has included development of statistical methods for estimating benchmark dose markers from environmental hazard analyses; see our interactive benchmark analysis website at http://dostat.stat.sc.edu/bands/. This research has been funded by the U.S. National Cancer Institute, and is currently funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

I have also identified translational applications of these approaches to terrorism assessment, identifying 'benchmark' separators that distinguish a city's terrorism vulnerability based on geo-spatially referenced indices. This produced a spatial map of vulnerability among the largest U.S. cities: GREEN if the city exhibited relatively moderate terrorist vulnerability, YELLOW if it exhibited increased vulnerability, and RED if it exhibited exceptionally high vulnerability. (No U.S. location is invulnerable to terrorism!) See the BIO5 Institute's summary news release or the KUAT-TV video interview for more on these results. The research was funded by the Department of Homeland Security via its National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START).

Some of my previous work has included interlaboratory analysis of data from transgenic bio-technologies, development of statistical guidelines for the design of toxicokinetic studies, and practical implementation of retrospective designs for analyzing gene-environment interactions in human population studies.


I direct the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program (GIDP) in Statistics at the University of Arizona, and have faculty appointments/membership in the Departments of Mathematics (home department) and Agricultural & Biosystems Engineering, the Division of Epidemiology & Biostatistics in the College of Public Health, and the GIDP of Applied Mathematics, and am Director of Statistical Research and Education with the BIO5 Institute.


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