Proceedings of the Second Seattle Symposium in Biostatistics

The First Seattle Symposium in Biostatistics: Survival Analysis was held on November 20and 21, 1995in honor ofthe twenty-fifth anniversary ofthe University of Washington (UW) School of Public Health and Community Medicine. The event was a big success. Exactly 5 years later, the Second Seattle Symposium in Biostatistics: Analysis of Correlated Data washeld on November 20 and 21, 2000, and it was also very successful. The event was sponsored by Pfizer and co-sponsored by the UW School of Public Health and Community Medicine and the Division of Public Health Sciences, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC). The symposium fea­ tured keynote lectures by Norman Breslow, David Cox and Ross Prentice, as well as invited talks by Raymond Carroll, Peter Diggle, Susan Ellen­ berg, Ziding Fan, Mitchell Gail, Stephen Lagakos, Nan Laird, Kung-Yee Liang, Roderick Little, Thoms Louis, David Oakes, Robert O'Neill, James Robins, Bruce Thrnbull, Mei-Cheng Wang and Jon Wellner. There were 336 attendees. In addition, 100 people attended the short course Analy­ sis of Longitudinal Data taught by Patrick Heagerty and Scott Zeger on November 18, and 96 attended the short course Analysis of Multivariate Failure Time Data taught by Danyu Lin, Lee-Jen Wei and Zhiliang Ying on November 19. When the UW School of Public Health and Community Medicine was formed in 1970, biostatistics as a discipline was only a few years old. In the subsequent thirty years, both the field and the UW Department of Biostatistics have evolved in many exciting ways.