Special Issue in Honour of Stan Azen: a Birthday Celebration

This special issue of Computational Statistics and Data Analysis (CSDA) is dedicated to Dr. Stanley Azen, founding Editor and continuing Editor-in-Chief of CSDA for the past 20 years. The Special Issue consists of peer review papers from the Editorial Board members of CSDA. Dr. Azen has made innumerable contributions to biomedical research during his career as a researcher and educator. As a devoted and caring human being he also has fostered the careers of hundreds of young investigators, encouraging and enlightening them with his intelligence, compassion, and enduring sense of humor. As a researcher, Dr. Azen has been a key investigator (Principal or Co-Principal) in over 50 grants, funded by the National Institutes of Health or by the private sector. His research areas have encompassed clinical trials to investigate new therapies and preventions in cardiovascular disease, diabetes, ophthalmology, stroke, and AIDS; epidemiological studies to determine the causes and risk factors in cardiovascular disease, ocular disease, diabetes, and hypertension; and methodological research in biostatistics, neural networks, and biomedical informatics. Not only has Dr. Azen contributed to the design, implementation, and analysis of these research studies, but he also is an extraordinary and proli4c author, having published over 220 papers in major medical and biostatistical journals throughout his career. As an exceptional and gifted educator, Dr. Azen was the “founding father” of the Masters and Doctoral training programs in biostatistics and epidemiology at the University of Southern California (USC) Keck School of Medicine. These training programs have grown from 4 graduate students in the 4rst year, to over 200 graduate students per year in 2003. His most recent accomplishment was the establishment in 2003 of two new innovative training programs in molecular epidemiology and statistical genetics. Dr. Azen has personally mentored and trained hundreds of graduate and medical students, creating generations of new researchers who have gone on to become faculty members, clinical investigators, and research directors, making their own contributions to advancing biomedical research. For his articulate, inspiring, and engagingly humorous teaching style, in 1998 Dr. Azen was awarded the prestigious USC Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching. Dr. Azen’s interest in the computational aspects of statistical methods date back to his contributions to the ground-breaking textbook Statistical Analysis: A Computer-Oriented Approach, co-authored in 1972 with Dr. A.A. A44. Dr. Azen’s latest contribution to the world of biomedical research is through the interfacing of biomedical informatics