Harry A. Guess, MD, PhD (24 December 1940 - 1 January 2006), a leading figure in the pharmacoepidemiology community, was an American physician-epidemiologist and biostatistician whose work ranged from drug safety to outcomes research. His career was spent in academia, government, and industry.
Early life
On 24 December 1940, Harry A. Guess was born in New York City (USA), the son of Harry A. Guess and Vista Brabham Guess.1 Following his mother’s death shortly after his birth, Guess was adopted by his aunt Dorothy Brabham Guess, who had married his father. After his father’s death in 1946, Guess lived with his adoptive mother in Bamberg, South Carolina.2 He attended the Georgia Institute of Technology on a Navy ROTC scholarship and graduated in 1964 with both bachelor’s and master’s degrees.3 He served in the U.S. Navy for five and a half years, during which he was assigned to be on Admiral Hyman G. Rickover’s staff at the Atomic Energy Commission, Division of Naval Reactors.4
Guess attended Stanford University after completing his military service.5 In 1972, he received both a Ph.D. in Mathematics and a M.S. in Operational Research from Stanford. After a year of teaching, Guess spent two years at Bell Laboratories developing statistical models of communication networks and went to the National Institutes of Health to work on mathematical population genetics and biostatistics. There he and others developed what has become a widely used method for calculating the statistical uncertainty in cancer risk estimates based on animal data. This work kindled an interest in taking a more biological approach to understanding human health risks. He enrolled in medical school at the University of Miami. (M.D. 1979) with epidemiologic research as his career goal.6 His residency training in pediatrics was the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He later added board certification in preventive medicine and public health.
Career
In 1985, Guess established the Epidemiology Department at Merck Research Laboratories (a subsidiary of Merck, Sharpe and Dohme), rising to become a Vice President.7 He left Merck in 2003 to become the first director of the University of North Carolina-GlaxoSmithKline Center of Excellence in Pharmacoepidemiology and Public Health at the University of North Carolina, and professor of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Pediatrics. Guess led the University of North Carolina Center for Education and Research on Therapeutics (CERT), which focused on the optimal use of drugs, medical devices and biological products in pediatrics.8,9 He also obtained NIH funding to lead the University efforts regarding the dynamic assessment of patient-reported chronic disease outcomes (PROMIS).10 Guess's career straddled pharmacoepidemiology and public health, and he strove to address practical issues facing the industry and clinicians with an academic and innovative approach to complex problems.11,12 He made notable contributions to research on vaccines, the natural history of complex disease, development and validation of clinical trial endpoints and patient reported outcomes, and pharmacoepidemiology, in many cases setting the industry standard.13,14
Among Guess's many interests in was pharmacoepidemiology was the need for privacy of medical records, at the same time recognizing the need by pharmacoepidemiologists to work with such data. He gave invited testimony to the United States Congress in 1998 on medical data privacy.
Over the years, Guess was a mentor to numerous junior and senior scientists at Merck, Sharpe and Dohme, and the University of North Carolina, and other institutions, guiding their development and improving their understanding of epidemiologic concepts. His success in academia and industry was remarkable, yet his research endeavors were always accomplished while pursuing one of his passions: teaching and advising graduate students. At the University of North Carolina and elsewhere, Guess was known as the consummate teacher and sought after advisor for graduate students and colleagues.
An active member of the international pharmacoepidemiology community, Guess was a participant at the inaugural International Conference on Linked Databases in 1985 and an active participant in the successor International Conference on Pharmacoepidemiology . He was also an active member of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research. In addition, Guess served one term as a Trustee on the Board of the Drug Information Association (1989-1991) and as a Trustee on the Board of the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology (2001-2005). He also served as Preisdent of the Drug Information Association in 1992. Guess served on the editorial boards of Epidemiology, Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, and Journal of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.
Guess served on numerous governmental grant committees, including the US FDA Pharmacoepidemiology Grant Review Committee (1990-2001), Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHCPR) Pharmaceutical Outcomes Research Grant Review Committee (1992, 1995 (Chairman)), and as an external advisor to Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Large Linked Database Project for post-marketing vaccine safety studies (1990-1997).
Personal life
Guess married Geraldine Graflund in 1965.15 They raised a family of two daughters, Carol Guess and Alison Guess Fitton.16
Honors and awards
Guess was a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Preventive Medicine, the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology (Charter Class), and the American College of Epidemiology.17 He was named to Who’s Who in Medicine and Health in 2003.
In 2005, Guess received the inaugural Award for Sustained Scientific Excellence from the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology.18
Two scholarship funds at the University of North Carolina were establishedin his memory in 2006: The Harry A. Guess-Merck Scholarship in Pharmacoepidemiology and the Harry Guess Scholarship in Epidemiology.19
Publications
Guess was the author or co-author of more than 150 publications. A listing of some of these papers may be found at http://harryguess.unc.edu/publications.htm.20,21
References
http://www.ispor.org/guess_inmemoriam.asp
http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/jan06/guess010506.htm
http://harryguess.unc.edu/index.htm
External links
http://harryguess.unc.edu/index.htm
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