Screening Mammography: Science, Policy and Politics – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The 2013 Annual Advances in Cancer Prevention Lecture will be given by Dr. Diana B. Petitti, widely regarded as one of the world's leading epidemiologic experts on hormones and disease. Her recent work has focused on the applications of systematic review, meta-analysis and decision analysis to the formulation of health policy.

Dr. Petitti received her BA degree from Cornell University, her MD from Harvard Medical School, and her MPH from Berkeley School of Public Health. She has held positions with the Centers for Disease Control as an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer, as a faculty member at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, and as Director of Research and Evaluation and Senior Advisor for Health Policy with Kaiser Permanente Southern California. Dr. Petitti served as Vice-Chair of the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) from 2003-2009. She contributed substantially to development of the methods used by the USPSTF to make its recommendations and is a co-author on the three publications of the USPSTF describing these methods. She participated in the review of evidence about mammography screening that led to 2009 USPSTF recommendations that received national and international attention and were the subject of a special hearing by the United States House of Representatives.