Marshfield Clinic Research Institute (MCRI) Senior Biostatistician, Burney Kieke, MS, has been awarded the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Vaccine Safety Datalink Margarette Kolczak Award for his contributions to vaccine safety analyses, including studies of influenza vaccine safety in pregnancy and real-time monitoring of Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine safety in adolescents. Kieke received the award on May 2 at the CDC Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) conference.
Through the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Population Health (CCEPH) at MCRI, Marshfield Clinic Health System is one of seven health care systems that participate in the CDC-funded Vaccine Safety Datalink.
The VSD uses health care and immunization data from participating sites to monitor the safety of vaccines after they are licensed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Other VSD sites include HealthPartners in Minnesota and Kaiser Permanente Health Care Systems in Washington, Oregon, California and Colorado.
"When a vaccine has been approved by the FDA and used in the general population, we like to as quickly as possible get out there and evaluate whether it is safe or not," Kieke said.
CCEPH was recently the lead site on an HPV vaccine safety research project, which adds additional responsibilities for the site including pooling the data from all of the sites, analyzing the data and disseminating analytic results back to the researchers.
This process is time consuming, but Kieke found a way to make it faster by using his programming background.
"It can be a burdensome process for the site that is conducting the weekly analyses, but I developed a programming infrastructure that automated the process," Kieke said. "Hopefully it can be applied in future studies."
For Kieke, this award was extra special to him because he personally knew Kolczak, a VSD biostatistician who died of cancer in 2005 and who the award is named after, from his graduate school program.
"I knew her for probably five years before she joined the VSD team at CDC. Margaret and I were in the same biostatistics program at Emory University. She was my unofficial mentor. I was starting the program and she was on the far end of the program," Kieke said. "It is special to me personally to receive this award because she was a close friend and really good person."
After his schooling, Kieke worked for the CDC for nine years before coming to MCRI, citing the small community as one of the main reasons his family moved here.
Despite the small-town appeal of Marshfield, Kieke is honored to have won this award while being in such prestigious company.
"There are a lot of impressive epidemiologists and biostatisticians in this group, so I was not expecting to win this award," Kieke said.