Faculty Profile: Thomas Ten Have, PhD, MPH, works to adapt treatments to the patient context
SEPTEMBER 21, 2006
The eldest son of missionaries, Thomas Ten Have was raised in Korea, Malaysia, and Nepal before his family left the missionary business and moved to Grand Rapids, MI when Tom was 12 years old. After concentrating on art during high school, Tom focused on accounting and algebra in junior college prior to entering the undergraduate business program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Of the entire business curriculum, he found himself most interested in data analysis and management. A serendipitous perusal of a pamphlet on statistics that he found in the university counseling office prompted Tom to change the course of his undergraduate career.
He began his research career as a research assistant at the University of Michigan Department of Biostatistics in 1980. In 1981, he received a BA in statistics with distinction. Tom perpetuated his familial tradition of earning a master's in public health (though in a discipline not typical of his family) when he received his MPH in biostatistics at the University of Michigan the following year. He stayed in Ann Arbor for a while, analyzing craniofacial and orthodontic data for about six years while also working at a mental health community center before embarking on doctoral studies. His hard work earned him the University of Michigan's Regents Fellowship from 1989 to 1990 and the Rackham Graduate School Predoctoral Fellowship from 1990-1991. In 1991, Tom received a PhD in biostatistics, staying on at the University of Michigan to work as a research associate in the Department of Pathology, in the School of Medicine, and in the Department of Oral Biology, in the School of Dentistry. In addition, Dr. Ten Have served as a computer consultant in the university's Statistical Research Laboratory. He served as a visiting associate professor at the University of Michigan Department of Biostatistics from 1991-92.
In 1992, Dr. Ten Have became an Associate Professor in the Center for Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine. During the ensuing five years, he conducted research in categorical data analysis, random effects models, and informative drop-out approaches. During this time, he authored papers that were published in peer-reviewed journals such as Applied Statistics, Statistics in Medicine and Biometrics. In 1995, he was awarded the March of Dime's Basil O' Connor Starter Research Award followed by an NCI First Award.
In 1997, Dr. Ten Have joined the University of Pennsylvania's CCEB as an Associate Professor in the Division of Biostatistics, becoming a full professor with tenure in 2001. As evidenced by the psychiatric and mental health research that he conducts and on which he collaborates, Dr. Ten Have is committed to enhancing the range and quality of treatments for mental health disorders and improving treatment adherence on the part of patients and providers. He has recently completed, as principal investigator, an R01 NIH grant for a study titled "Mixed Effects Models for Discrete Data with Non-Compliance." This project extended current statistical methodologies for estimating causal treatment effects under non-ignorable treatment non-compliance in psychiatric randomized trials to modeling clustered discrete responses with mixed effects logistic models. Dr. Ten Have is also collaborating on an R01 NIH-supported trial titled "Managed Problem Solving: An HIV Adherence Trial." This is a randomized clinical trial of problem solving-derived interventions to improve HIV treatment adherence. In addition, he is a co-investigator for the Advanced Center for Intervention Services Research for Depression in the Aged, sponsored by the National Institutes of Mental Health, and is currently collaborating on a P20 NIH study titled "Cognitive Therapy for the Prevention of Suicide," which is being led by Dr. Aaron Beck, the "father of cognitive therapy." In short, the overarching emphasis of Dr. Ten Have's investigative focus is translational research, specifically incorporating feedback from the community and medical providers to render more robust treatments. Consequently, Dr. Ten Have is interested in not only whether a medication is efficacious, but on how best to get the drug to work in realistic conditions. His methodologies can be applied, for example, to the proposed once/daily treatment for AIDS, which has been driven by patient input. In fact, Dr. Ten Have is collaborating with the Robert Gross, MD, MSCE, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Infectious Diseases Division, on research into AIDS treatment. In addition, he is collaborating on asthma treatment research with Andrea Apter, MD, MA, MSc, Associate Professor of Medicine, Allergy and Immunology Division. In adapting treatments to the patient context, Dr. Ten Have notes that behavioral theories on changing treatment non-adherence are often not sensitive to culture and economic disparity.
In addition to his research and teaching responsibilities, Dr. Ten Have serves as a member of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, The International Biometrics Society, the Society for Epidemiological Research, and the American Public Health Association. In 1999, he was named a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. Currently, he is a charter member of an NIMH study section and an NIMH DSMB. He is also an associate editor for Biometrics.