Principles of Biostatistics in Clinical Research
Instructor: Charles Spiekerman, PhD

Introduction to the basic ideas of point estimation, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, power and sample size. Specific examples using means and T tests will be used to illustrate the concepts.

Clinical Epidemiology and Study Design in Dentistry
Instructor: Mark Drangsholt, DDS, MPH

Overview of scientific priciples in clinical reasearch, including biological plausibility; formulation of a research question; the importance of comparison and tempoality in establishing casuality; refutation; placebo effects; introduction to and comparisons of three research designs: the case-control study, the cohort study, and the randomized controlled trial.

Behavioral Research in Dentistry
Instructor: Jeffrey Sherman, PhD

Introduction to some of the most commonly used methods and study designs in behavioral dental research, as well as current concepts of behavioural change models with applications to studies of pain, neurosensory assessment, temporomandibular disorders, and measures of quality of life.

Fundamentals of Randomized Clinical Trials
Instructor: Timothy A. DeRouen, PhD

Fundamental issues in randomized clinical trials, including what constitutes a clinical trial; reasons why clinicals are used; characteristics of good trials; recruitment; compliance; limitation of results; ethical issues.

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Faculty

Charles Spiekerman, PhD, is Research Scientist in the Department of Health Sciences. He is the biostatistician on research projects in the Comprehensive Center for Oral Health Research and the Northwest/Alaska Center to Reduce Oral Health Disparities, and he has particular expertise in statistical methods useful for handling correlated dental data, especially time-to-failure data.

Mark Drangsholt, DDS, MPH, is lecturer in the Departments of Oral Medicine and Dental Public Health Sciences. He is an oral medicine specialist and epidemiologist with research interests in the patterns and etiology of chronic pain, the role of dental radiography and ionizing radiation in meningioma, and principles of evidence-based dentistry.

Jeffrey Sherman, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Oral Medicine. He is a psychologist with research interests in psychophysiological and hormonal correlates of pain, treatment of chronic pain, and behaviour modification.

Timothy A. DeRouen, PhD, is Executive Associate Dean for Research and Academic Affairs in the School of Dentistry; Professor of Biostatistics (School of Public Health) and Dental Public Health Sciences (School of Dentistry); and Principal Investigator of "The Casa Pia Study of the Health Effects of Dental Amalgam in Children", an international randomized clinical trial underway since 1996.

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