Growing and maintaining healthy forests isn’t just about science. It also involves a lot of mathematics. And we’re not talking about calculating the number of seedlings you’ll need to plant, or the quantity of wood you might harvest—although those are important. But in between the planting and the harvesting comes a bevy of statistics and analysis. For decades, it’s been a foundation of the forestry program at the University of Georgia Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources. But, it turns out, all that statistical knowledge can also come in handy in other fields. “For example, my master’s thesis was on predicting survival of loblolly pine. Well, a lot of the same techniques are used to predict the survival of a person, say, infected with a disease,” says Owen Devine, a 1982 Warnell graduate who began working for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention a few years after receiving his master’s degree. “My statistical training at UGA got put directly to use when I worked for the CDC. The difference is, when you predict the health of trees, they don’t lie on surveys about how often they work out.” Devine isn’t the only Warnell graduate now putting his mathematical skills to use in a public health realm. He and others recently came into focus for papers they penned for the CDC that were honored by the organization’s annual Statistical Science Awards. The awards honor the best papers published by CDC statisticians from the previous year that focus on the statistical analysis of public health data. Devine and Charles Rose (MS ’00, PhD ’02) won the “Applied” category with a paper on folic acid, a nutrient essential to infant health. In the award’s “Theoretical” category, Rose, along with Rongxia (Tiffany) Li (MS ’07, PhD ’07) and Brock Stewart (BS ’01, MS ’04, MS ’07, PhD ’07) won with their paper on vaccine safety surveillance. In other words, Warnell graduates—and their statistical knowledge rooted in forest health—received all the 2020 statistical accolades from the country’s top public health agency. Rose and Devine’s paper, “Systematic Review and Bayesian Meta-analysis of the Dose-response Relationship between Folic Acid Intake and Changes in Blood Folate Concentrations,” reviewed thousands of records to estimate the body’s response to specific dosages of folic acid, a nutrient essential to reducing the risk of neural tube related birth defects In the theoretical category, the winning paper by Rose, Li and Stewart, titled “A Bayesian approach to sequential analysis in post‐licensure vaccine safety surveillance,” investigated the potential of Bayesian statistics in the field of vaccine safety. Through their research, the scientists determined this approach to be a promising alternative for monitoring vaccine safety. Stewart, Li and Rose are all employed by the CDC in various statistician roles. Separately, Stewart and Li have co-authored dozens of papers assessing vaccine safety and monitoring. Rose has worked on a variety of projects spanning Zika, women’s health and HIV around the world. But in the past year, the trio have moved from their typical assignments to focus on COVID-19 data, contributing papers on mask mandates and disease hot spots, among other topics. Devine retired from the CDC in 2015 but continues to work on a contract basis for the agency. Rose now holds the position Devine held. Recent projects have tasked Devine with creating statistical models for the National Center for Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. Folic acid, he notes, is a public health success story in this regard, as fortified foods have helped dramatically reduce the number of neural tube defects in babies. “In this most recent paper we said, if we know we want to get a certain level of folic acid into a woman’s blood cells, how much folic acid to we need to get into her diet?” he says. “We looked at a bunch of studies, put all the information together and synthesized it using Bayesian methods, and came up with an idea of how much we might really want to supplement folic acid intake to get that goal that we estimate to be necessary to get neural tube defects down.” But other work with the agency has tasked Devine with looking at veterans exposed to Agent Orange, the HIV-AIDS epidemic and populations exposed to radiation. Decades after graduating from Warnell, though, he still reflects on the classes he took and the experience he gained. Those statistics classes laid a foundation for Devine and others to do great work in and outside of forestry. While working at CDC, Devine received his PhD in biostatistics from Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, where he has been a member of the adjunct faculty for more than 25 years. “The first thing I’d tell students today is, you’re going to be a better forester, or better in whatever field you choose to follow, the more quantitatively talented you are. But, that’s always been the philosophy at Warnell,” he says. “Take all the math and statistics you can. It’s hard, but when you get into a career, you’re going to be glad you did so.” He laughs when he recalls a luncheon, pre-COVID, for CDC statisticians. He met Rose there, and once they discovered their Warnell connections, Rose turned to Stewart, who was also sitting at the table. In total, there were at least four Warnell alumni at the event. They all celebrated their connections to Warnell—and of statistical analysis. “I had an absolutely wonderful career. I loved my job from the day I started to the day I retired,” Devine adds. “My co-authors on this paper, and virtually everyone I have worked with at CDC, are some of the most talented and dedicated scientists on the planet. Working with them has been a joy.”
