Donna Armstrong is a new faculty member this year in the Department of Epidemiology in the School of Public Health.

Armstrong served as an Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) officer for the Centers for Disease Control during the past two years, with her primary assignment in the Washington State Department of Health. She received her Ph.D. in epidemiology from the University of North Carolina in 1993.

She joins the Albany-based research team studying the health effects of exposure to toxic substances on the Akwesasne reservation in northern New York. Armstrong will also continue her own research on economic and social factors in the etiology and management of chronic diseases, with a focus on cardiovascular diseases and diabetes.

She held a postdoctoral position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's epidemiology department from March through June of 1994, in a project re-analyzing data from a study of cancer incidence and the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident of 1978. She was an associate of Clement International, Research Triangle Park from 1993 to 1994, and principal investigator of grant-funded dissertation research in 1992-1993 on U.S. age, race, and sex-specific ill-defined mortality rates.

"Dr. Armstrong will be involved in teaching both semesters courses in the required introductory sequence in epidemiology," said Lloyd Lininger, of the Department of Biometry and Statistics "She Armstrong will also help to develop and teach a new course on the epidemiology of cardiovascular diseases."

Zhengqing Li is a new addition this academic year to the faculty of the Department of Biometry & Statistics in the School of Public Health.

Li was a teaching assistant during 1993-94 and a research assistant in 1995 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he received his Ph.D. in 1996. In 1993, Li received the graduate assistant award for achievement in research from the department of statistics at the University of South Carolina, where he earned his M.S. in statistics. He received his B.S. in mathematics with a major in statistics from the University of Science and Technology in China.

Igor Zurbenko, interim chair of Biometry and Statistics, said that, pending approval, Li will be working on a research project investigating cancer risks in Eastern Europe, and comparing them to those in developed countries. According to Zurbenko, "this will be a very important project for the School of Public Health, and for the University." Li added that "we are going to investigate the different death rates and then, hopefully, with these results, we will be able to work on improving the environmental factors which are harmful."

Li has been involved in several research projects where he analyzed various health-risk factors and has also provided statistical consultation for cancer centers, research chemical engineers, and private industry. He has written for numerous publications on a variety of subjects, including on different designs for a binary-contingent response.

He is currently a member of the American Statistical Association of the Royal Statistical Society, and, as a graduate student, was a member of the admission committee in Wisconsin-Madison's statistics department, where he helped to select the best applicants to the Master or Ph.D. program.

Rebecca Goldstein