Elizabeth Anne (Lianne) 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. In 2021, Dr. Sheppard was named to the Rohm & Haas Endowed Professorship of Public Health Sciences.[1][2]
Education
Dr. 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.[1] Her dissertation, Aggregate Data Methods for Relative Risk Parameter Estimation in Diet and Disease Prevention Research, was supervised by Ross L. Prentice.[3]
Research contributions
Dr. Sheppard's methodological research interests are observational study methods, exposure modeling, study design, and epidemiology. Her applied research focuses on the health effects of occupational and environmental exposures. She is principal investigator of the NIH-funded training grant Biostatistics, Epidemiologic & Bioinformatics Training in Environmental Health, and she oversees the SURE-EH training program, a project to promote diversity in the environmental health sciences. She is also co-principal investigator of the NIH-funded Adult Changes in Thought Air Pollution study and of a Health Effects Institute study to better understand the role of exposure assessment design and modeling in inference about air pollution health effects.[2]
She has published over 190 peer-reviewed publications.[4] Among her principal methodological/statistical contributions to the environmental health field are 1) developing statistical methods for aggregate data studies;[5][6][7] 2) developing measurement error correction methods for inference about health effects for applications to air pollution cohort studies;[8][9] 3) advancements in spatial and spatio-temporal modeling methods for air pollution exposures;[10][11] and 4) referent selection and analysis approaches for case-crossover study design for air pollution epidemiology.[12][13] She has also helped advance scientific understanding of the adverse effects of a variety of environmental exposures, including air pollution,[14][15][16][17] noise,[18] manganese,[19][20] and pesticides.[21][22]
Policy Contributions
In 2016, Dr. Sheppard was chosen to chair a panel of the United States Environmental Protection Agency to examine in what quantities nitrogen oxides are harmful.[23] However, in 2018 the Trump administration replaced Dr. Sheppard and other academic experts on the panel with public health officials, at the same time disbanding a related panel on particulate pollution. Dr. Sheppard was quoted as saying that these changes would "result in poorer-quality scientific oversight".[24] Dr. 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.[25]
Dr. 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.[27]
In 2020, she received the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE) Research Integrity Award.[28]
^Szpiro, A. A.; Paciorek, C. J.; Sheppard, L. (2011), "Does more accurate exposure prediction necessarily improve health effect estimates?", Epidemiology, 22 (5): 680–685, doi:10.1097/EDE.0b013e3182254cc6, PMC3195520, PMID21716114
^Seixas, N. S.; Sheppard, L. (1996), "Maximizing accuracy and precision using individual and grouped exposure assessments", Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health, 22 (2): 94–101, doi:10.5271/sjweh.116, PMID8738886
^Lindström, J.; Szpiro, A. A.; Sampson, P. D.; Oron, A. P.; Richards, M.; Larson, T. V.; Sheppard, L. (2014), "A Flexible Spatio-Temporal Model for Air Pollution with Spatial and Spatio-Temporal Covariates", Environmental and Ecological Statistics, 21 (3): 411–433, doi:10.1007/s10651-013-0261-4, PMC4174563, PMID25264424
^Levy, D.; Lumley, T.; Sheppard, L.; Kaufman, J.; Checkoway, H. (2001), "Referent selection in case-crossover analyses of acute health effects of air pollution", Epidemiology, 12 (2): 186–192, doi:10.1097/00001648-200103000-00010, PMID11246579, S2CID36828973
^Janes, H.; Sheppard, L.; Lumley, T. (2005), "Case-crossover analyses of air pollution exposure data: referent selection strategies and their implications for bias", Epidemiology, 16 (6): 717–726, doi:10.1097/01.ede.0000181315.18836.9d, PMID16222160, S2CID24915212
^Kaufman, J. D.; Adar, S. D.; Barr, R. G.; Budoff, M.; Burke, G. L.; Curl, C. L.; Daviglus, M. L.; Diez Roux, A. V.; Gassett, A. J.; Jacobs Jr, D. R.; Kronmal, R.; Larson, T. V.; Navas-Acien, A.; Olives, C.; Sampson, P. D.; Sheppard, L.; Siscovick, D. S.; Stein, J. H.; Szpiro, A. A.; Watson, K. E. (2016), "Association between air pollution and coronary artery calcification within six metropolitan areas in the USA (the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis and Air Pollution): a longitudinal cohort study", Lancet, 388 (10045): 696–704, doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(16)00378-0, PMC5019949, PMID27233746
^Miller, Kristin A.; Siscovick, David S.; Sheppard, Lianne; Shepherd, Kristen; Sullivan, Jeffrey H.; Anderson, Garnet L.; Kaufman, Joel D. (2007), "Long-Term Exposure to Air Pollution and Incidence of Cardiovascular Events in Women", New England Journal of Medicine, 356 (5): 447–458, doi:10.1056/nejmoa054409, PMID17267905
^Shaffer, Rachel M.; Blanco, Magali N.; Li, Ge; Adar, Sara D.; Carone, Marco; Szpiro, Adam A.; Kaufman, Joel D.; Larson, Timothy V.; Larson, Eric B.; Crane, Paul K.; Sheppard, Lianne (2021), "Fine Particulate Matter and Dementia Incidence in the Adult Changes in Thought Study", Environmental Health Perspectives, 129 (8): 087001, doi:10.1289/EHP9018, PMC8336685, PMID34347531
^Seixas, N. S.; Neitzel, R.; Stover, B.; Sheppard, L.; Feeney, P.; Mills, D.; Kujawa, S. (2012), "10-Year prospective study of noise exposure and hearing damage among construction workers", Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 69 (9): 643–650, doi:10.1136/oemed-2011-100578, PMC4570847, PMID22693267
^Racette, B. A.; Nelson, G.; Dlamini, W. W.; Prathibha, P.; Turner, J. R.; Ushe, M.; Checkoway, H.; Sheppard, L.; Nielsen, S. S. (2021), "Severity of parkinsonism associated with environmental manganese exposure", Environmental Health: A Global Access Science Source, 20 (1): 27, doi:10.1186/s12940-021-00712-3, PMC7962371, PMID33722243
^Criswell, S. R.; Nielsen, S. S.; Warden, M. N.; Flores, H. P.; Lenox-Krug, J.; Racette, S.; Sheppard, L.; Checkoway, H.; Racette, B. A. (2019), "MRI Signal Intensity and Parkinsonism in Manganese-Exposed Workers", Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 61 (8): 641–645, doi:10.1097/JOM.0000000000001634, PMC7098806, PMID31348423
^Sheppard, Lianne; McGrew, Seth; Fenske, Richard A. (2020), "Flawed analysis of an intentional human dosing study and its impact on chlorpyrifos risk assessments", Environment International, 143: 105905, doi:10.1016/j.envint.2020.105905, PMID32629200, S2CID220387157
^Zhang, Luoping; Rana, Iemaan; Shaffer, Rachel M.; Taioli, Emanuela; Sheppard, Lianne (2019), "Exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides and risk for non-Hodgkin lymphoma: A meta-analysis and supporting evidence", Mutation Research/Reviews in Mutation Research, 781: 186–206, doi:10.1016/j.mrrev.2019.02.001, PMC6706269, PMID31342895