Lianne Sheppard


Elizabeth Anne Sheppard is an American statistician. She specializes in biostatistics and environmental statistics, and in particular in the effects of air quality on health. She is a Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences and a Professor of Biostatistics in the University of Washington School of Public Health.

Contributions

In 2016, Sheppard was chosen to chair a panel of the United States Environmental Protection Agency to examine in what quantities nitrogen oxides are harmful. However, in 2018 the Trump administration replaced the Sheppard and other academic experts on the panel with public health officials, at the same time disbanding a related panel on particulate pollution. Sheppard was quoted as saying that these changes would "result in poorer-quality scientific oversight". Sheppard is also a participant in a lawsuit against new agency rules preventing scientists funded by the agency from serving on its panels, a move that caused her to step away from a three-million-dollar grant.

Education

Sheppard graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a bachelor's degree in psychology in 1979, and returned to Johns Hopkins for a master's degree in biostatistics in 1985. She completed her Ph.D. in biostatistics in 1992 at the University of Washington. Her dissertation, Aggregate Data Methods for Relative Risk Parameter Estimation in Diet and Disease Prevention Research, was supervised by Ross L. Prentice.

Recognition

Sheppard was chosen as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2006, "for contributions to observational studies and environmental occupational epidemiology; for thoughtful commentary in science-policy areas; and for commitment to bringing statistical methodology to elementary and high school education.