Gary S. Goldman, PhD, served for eight years (from January, 1995 until his resignation in October of 2002) as Research Analyst for the Varicella Active Surveillance Project (VASP) in Antelope Valley, in a cooperative project with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, Atlanta, GA). He developed a model that quantified the seasonal variation in chickenpox based on school enrollment (population density) and high ambient air temperature. Additionally, he created a database and data entry programs for several hundred demographic and clinical variables pertaining to chickenpox and shingles. This included logic to detect case duplicates (important for application of capture-recapture methods) and link cases originating from the same household. He also supplied the initiative and background material for the proposal to add shingles to the active surveillance program. Additionally, he wrote statistical analyses to (a) investigate 2nd varicella infections (later published in peer-reviewed medical journal), (b) study varicella susceptibility (presented at a symposium and published later outside VASP), (c) quantify transmission of varicella in households, (d) determine chickenpox vaccine efficacy by year (published later outside VASP), (e) track outbreaks of chickenpox in schools, (f) perform a cost-benefit analysis of universal varicella vaccination taking into account the closely related herpes zoster epidemiology (published later outside VASP), and (g) perform capture-recapture to measure reporting completeness of chickenpox cases to the surveillance project (published in The Journal of the American Medical Association--JAMA). Finally, Goldman computed both (1) true shingles incidence rate among children with previous histories of chickenpox and (2) true shingles incidence rate among vaccinated children so as to investigate trends in shingles incidence in a community under moderate to widespread varicella vaccination (published later outside VASP).
Dr. Goldman has served as a reviewer for the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Human and Experimental Toxicology (HET), Vaccine, The American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC), Expert Review of Vaccines (ERV), Expert Review of Dermatology (ERD), Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology (JEADV), Epidemiology and Infection, The Open Allergy Journal, BioMed Research International (Biomed Res Int), Epidemiology & Infection, Therapeutic Advances in Vaccines and Immunotherapy, Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), and British Medical Journal (BMJ). He is included on the Editorial Board of Research and Reviews in BioSciences.

ORCID ID

http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6039-3921

Reviewer Keywords