Dr. Karl E. Peace is currently the Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Cancer Scholar (GCCDCS), Senior Research Scientist and Professor of Biostatistics in the Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health at Georgia Southern University. He is the architect of the MPH in biostatistics and founding director of the Center for Biostatistics in the JPHCOPH. He holds the Ph.D. in biostatistics from the Medical College of Virginia, the M.S. in Mathematics from Clemson University, the B.S. in Chemistry from Georgia Southern College, and a Health Science Certificate from Vanderbilt University.
Dr. Peace’s first career was that of teaching and research at the university level. He previously taught at Georgia Southern College, Clemson University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Randolph-Macon College, where he was a tenured professor of Mathematics. He holds or has held numerous adjunct professorships: at the Medical College of Virginia, the University of Michigan, Temple University, the University of North Carolina, and Duke University.
Dr. Peace’s second career was in research, technical support and management in the pharmaceutical industry. He held the positions of Senior Statistician at Burroughs-Wellcome, Manager of Clinical Statistics at A.H. Robins, Director of Research Statistics at SmithKline and French Labs, Senior Director of GI Clinical Studies, Data Management and Analysis, at G.D. Searle, and Vice President of World-Wide Technical Operations at Warner Lambert/Parke-Davis. He then founded Biopharmaceutical Research Consultants, Inc. (BRCI), where he held the positions of President, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Scientific Officer. Dr. Peace has made pivotal contributions in the development and approval of drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease, to prevent and treat gastrointestinal ulcers, to reduce the risk of myocardial infarction, to treat anxiety, depression and panic attacks, to treat hypertension and arthritis, and several antibiotics.
He is or has been a member of several professional and honorary societies, including the Drug Information Association, the Regulatory Affairs Professional Society, the Biometric Society, Technometrics, the American Society for Quality Control, Biometrika, the American Statistical Association, and Kappa Phi Kappa. He is a past member of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, National Research Council, National Academy of Science.
Dr. Peace is the recipient of numerous citations and awards: (1) Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Cancer Scholar, (2) Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA), (3) Tito Majaries Lifetime Achievement Award from the Philippine Statistical Association. (4) Statistics Section of the APHA, (5) the Distinguished Service Award of the Drug Information Association, (6) Star and Featured Alumnus, School of Basic Sciences, and Founder’s Society Medal from the Medical College of Virginia, (7) College of Science and Technology Alumnus of the year, Alumnus of the year in private enterprise, Presidential Fellowship Award, and the First Recipient of the prestigious President’s Medal for outstanding service and extraordinary contributions, all from Georgia Southern University, (8) Deen Day Smith Humanitarian of the Year Award, and (9) several meritorious service awards from the American Society for Quality Control and the Biopharmaceutical Applied Statistics Symposium (BASS). He is past Chair of the Biostatistics Subsection of the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (PMA), the Training Committee of the PMA Biostatistics Subsection, the Biopharmaceutical Section of the ASA, Founder and Chair of Workgroup Activity of the BPS, and is Founder and Chair of the Biopharmaceutical Applied Statistics Symposium (BASS).
Dr. Peace founded BASS in 1994 to provide an opportunity for biopharmaceutical professionals to share insight to common biopharmaceutical problems in a timely manner, and to provide a source for funding endowments to support graduate work in biostatistics. Attendees and presenters at BASS derive from academia, the pharmaceutical industry and the U.S. government, particularly the Food and Drug Administration. Endowments have supported forty students in attaining the MPH or PhD in biostatistics.
Dr. Peace has a lengthy record of philanthropy to education. He has created twenty-one endowments at five institutions. Fourteen of these are at his undergraduate alma mater, Georgia Southern University, including five for students from his native Baker County, Georgia (two of these honor his high school mathematics teacher, Mr. Bill Tom Reeves, and principal, Mr. Joe Vines, and three honor his son, sister and brother). Three are at his PhD alma mater, the Medical College of Virginia. Two are at the PhD alma mater of his late wife, the University of California at Berkeley. One is at Randolph-Macon College and one is under the umbrella of the International Chinese Statistical Association. In addition, at Georgia Southern University, he endowed the first Eminent Scholar Chair, endowed the JPHCOPH – the first school of public health in the University System of Georgia, and endowed the first Eminent Scholar Chair in Public Health. He also established the first Endowed Chair in Biostatistics at UCB: the Jiann-Ping Hsu/Karl E. Peace Chair. These endowments have supported more than one hundred fifty students in various degree seeking programs.
Dr. Peace has also given generously in terms of time and money to various organizations in their fight against the war on cancer. These include the American Cancer Society, the Georgia Cancer Coalition, the Southeast Georgia Cancer Alliance and the Southwest Georgia Cancer Coalition.
His work has been published extensively in pharmaceutical, statistical, medical and scientific literature. He is the author or co-author of over one hundred articles and five books and the editor or reviewer of several peer-reviewed journals, including the founding editor of the Journal of Biopharmaceutical Statistics, now in its sixteenth year. One of his books: Biopharmaceutical Statistics for Drug Development has been translated into several foreign languages including Japanese, and has been used extensively as ‘the bible for drug development’ in the Japanese pharmaceutical industry. He has given over one hundred and fifty invited presentations worldwide in the scientific, statistical, medical and pharmaceutical arenas.