On 5 January 2001, the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council nominated twelve members to its panel to review the scientific evidence on the polygraph:
With these appointments, a 20-day period for public comment began. The responsible staff officer is Paul Stern <pstern@nas.edu>. To help those who may wish to comment on the appointments, we've taken the National Research Council's biographical sketches of the provisional members and added links for most members' web sites and e-mail addresses:
Date Posted: 01/05/2001
Stephen E. Fienberg <fienberg@stat.cmu.edu>, Chair, is Maurice Falk University Professor of Statistics and Social Science, and Acting Director of the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery, at Carnegie Mellon University. His principal research interest is the development of statistical methodology. Dr. Fienberg has also been active in the application of statistical methods to legal problems and in assessing the appropriateness of statistical testimony in legal cases. Other research interests include analysis of categorical data, Bayesian approaches to confidentiality and data disclosure, causation, foundations of statistical inference, history of statistics, and sample surveys and randomized experiments. Dr. Fienberg is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
James J. Blascovich <blascovi@psych.ucsb.edu> is Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include social psychophysiology, challenge and threat motivation, and immersive virtual environments as a research tool. Dr. Blascovich takes a biopsychosocial approach to understanding the influence of intrapersonal and interpersonal factors on motivation and performance as measured subjectively, behaviorally, and physiologically. His biopsychosocial model specifies differential patterns of cardiovascular responses associated with challenge and threat in motivated performance situations. Dr. Blascovich also co-directs the Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior, where he uses immersive virtual environments to study social influence processes.
John T. Cacioppo <Cacioppo@uchicago.edu> is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He is also Director of the university's Social Psychology Program and Co-Director of its Institute for Mind and Biology. The general perspective Dr. Cacioppo takes in his research is social neuroscience, showing how biology and social behavior interact. His work has focused primarily on multi-level integrative studies of attitudes, affect, and emotion. His recent work has examined the component processes underlying affect and emotion.
Richard J. Davidson <rjdavids@facstaff.wisc.edu> is Director of the Laboratory of Affective Neuroscience and the Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Research in his laboratory focuses on cortical and subcortical substrates of emotion and affective disorders, including depression and anxiety, using quantitative electrophysiology, positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging to make inferences about patterns of regional brain function. A major focus of Dr. Davidson's current work is on interactions between prefrontal cortex and the amygdala in the regulation of emotion in both normal subjects and patients with affective and anxiety disorders.
Paul Ekman <ekmansf@itsa.ucsf.edu> is Director of the Human Interaction Laboratory and Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Francisco. He has been conducting basic research on the expression of emotion expression, and applied studies of interpersonal deception for more than thirty years. Dr. Ekman is currently one of the investigators in a federal contract to utilize computers to automate the technique he developed for measuring facial muscular movement off of videotape or film. He is the author of two books on interpersonal deception and has taught extensively about how to discern truthfulness to judges and law enforcement personnel in the United States and England.
David L. Faigman <faigmand@uchastings.edu> is Professor of Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, in San Francisco. He writes extensively on the law's use of science, as well as on topics of constitutional law. He also lectures regularly to federal and state judges on issues concerning sciences and the law. Faigman's book, Legal Alchemy: The Use and Misuse of Science in the Law, was published by W.H. Freeman & Co. in 1999. He also co-authored a three volume treatise, Modern Scientific Evidence: The Law and Science of Expert Testimony (with Kaye, Saks & Sanders), published by West Publishing Company in 1997. That treatise has been cited widely by courts, including several times by the United States Supreme Court.
Patricia L. Grambsch <pat@biostat.umn.edu> is Associate Professor in Biostatistics at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She has had research experience at the Mayo Clinic and Bell Labs. Dr. Grambsch's research interests include mathematical modeling of biological phenomena, survival analysis with emphasis on counting process approaches and diagnostics, and sequential analysis.
Peter B. Imrey <p-imrey@ux6.cso.uiuc.edu> is Professor in the Departments of Statistics, Medical Information Science, and Community Health at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and in the Center for Molecular Biology of Oral Diseases of the College of Dentistry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His methodological interests include analysis of multivariate categorical data, linear models, sample survey methods, and quantitative epidemiology, and he has collaborated extensively in design and analysis of biomedical and health science research. Dr. Imrey has considerable experience on federal review and advisory panels for NIH and other agencies. He is Chair-Elect of the American Public Health Association's Statistics Section, has previously chaired the Biometrics Section and the Section on Teaching of Health Statistics of the American Statistical Association, and has served on the Governing Councils of the American Public Health Association and the International Biometric Society. He was Associate Editor of The American Statistician for several terms, and currently sits on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Biopharmaceutical Statistics.
Emmett B. Keeler <emmett@rand.org> is a senior mathematician at RAND and is the principal investigator of the Improving Chronic Illness Care Evaluation. He has conducted technical analysis for dozens of studies in the areas of evaluating quality improvement interventions, insurance design, cost-effectiveness, and quality-of-care statistics. Dr. Keeler is an associate editor of Health Services and Outcomes Research Methodology.
Kathryn B. Laskey <klaskey@gmu.edu> is Associate Professor of Systems Engineering at George Mason University and a Career Development Fellow with the Krasnow Institute for Cognitive Science, as well as a faculty associate with the Center of Excellence in Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence at George Mason University. Her primary research interest is the use of information technology to support better inference and decision making. Dr. Laskey has worked on the application of decision theory to intelligent decision and inference support systems, as well as understanding the proper role of normative, behavioral, and computational theories in the modeling and support of inference and decision making.
Kevin R. Murphy <krm10@psu.edu> is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Pennsylvania State University, University Park. He is a psychologist whose research is in the area of industrial/organizational psychology and multivariate statistics and psychometrics. Dr. Murphy serves as a journal editor and on several review panels. He is a past president of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. He was a member of three National Research Council Committees, the Committee on Drug Use in the Workplace, the committee on Performance Appraisal and the Roundtable on Work, Learning and Assessment.
Marcus E. Raichle <marc@npg.wustl.edu> is Professor of Radiology and Neurology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. He was a pioneer in the study of functional activity throughout the human brain during normal cognitive function and in neuropsychiatric disease. Dr. Raichle's research focuses on the use of two brain imaging techniques, positron emission tomography or PET and magnetic resonance imaging or MRI. Both techniques permit an assessment of the function of the human brain because they are able to detect changes in blood flow or metabolism that are the consequence of changes, locally, in the activity of neurons and their supporting cells. He has been involved with all aspects of the development of these techniques for the study of brain function since their introduction in the early 1970s. Since that time, functional neuroimaging has become a cornerstone of the new field of cognitive neuroscience.
Dr. Raichle's more recent research has been focused on the development of a better understanding of how the normal human brain implements language, memory and emotion. He is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine.
Richard M. Shiffrin <shiffrin@indiana.edu> is Luther Dana Waterman Research Professor in the Psychology Department at Indiana University. His theories of short-term memory, of automatic and controlled processes in attention, and of the processes of retrieval from long-term memory have profoundly influenced the course of cognitive psychology. Dr. Shiffrin has developed quantitative and computer simulation models of cognition and tested these against human data, as well as a theory of the way that attentive and automatic processes cooperate to overcome cognitive capacity limitations. His current work focuses on a general and new theory of memory that applies not only to storage and retrieval of recent events, but also to the domain of general knowledge, and shows how a single set of cognitive processes can predict both sets of phenomena. Dr. Shiffrin is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
John A. Swets (
on-line bibliographical sketch) is Chief Scientist Emeritus with BBN Technologies. His application of signal-detection theory, in collaboration with W.P. Tanner, Jr., created a new paradigm for the study of human sensory systems. His research centers on the psychological processes of sensation, perception, attention, thinking, learning, and decision making and on their applications to computer-aided instruction, enhancement of human performance, information retrieval, evaluation of diagnostic systems, and enhancement of diagnostic performance. Dr. Swets is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Although the public comment period regarding selection of members ends on 25 January 2001, comments on the project may be submitted to the National Academy of Sciences at any time over its duration:
You may additionally wish to publicly post any comments for the National Academy of Sciences here on the AntiPolygraph.org bulletin board.
reports that "[t]he first meeting of the study panel has been scheduled for January 26-27 at the National Academy building in Washington, DC. Most of the meeting will be open to the public." (The National Academy of Sciences building is located at 2100 C St. NW, Washington, DC.) Additional scheduling information will be posted here as it becomes available.