Robert W. Makuch, Ph.D., Professor in the Division of Biostatistics at Yale School of Public Health, received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Connecticut at a reception and banquet at its Alumni Center on April 17.
During the ceremony, Dr. Makuch discussed his time at the university as an undergraduate and his subsequent life-work. Professor Makuch's primary research interests involve methodologic issues in the design, conduct, and analysis of clinical studies. One area of particular interest is the appropriate design and analysis of active control equivalence studies, where he described in a series of papers how control groups should be selected, how the sample size for these studies is determined, and what constitute appropriate methods of analysis. In the mid-1980s, this research led him and collaborators to design AZT treatment studies for preventing HIV transmission from pregnant mothers to their unborn children during the third trimester. More recently, he published several papers examining a possible association between a class of popular medications and cardiovascular risk.
He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest undergraduate honors organization in the United States. Makuch earned his B.A. in Mathematics from UConn in 1972.