Doctor Irit Aitkin

BSc MA PhD Tel Aviv

Contact details:

I was trained in Statistics at Tel Aviv University and while there taught a wide range of courses, at both undergraduate and graduate levels, to students in statistics and other fields. I was the senior consultant 1975 - 1980 in the Statistical Consultancy Service provided by the Statistics Department to the Medical School. I also set up a statistical consultancy service for the three hospitals in the Tel Aviv Medical Center.

I moved to Australia with my husband Murray in 1992, first as a Visiting Fellow at NCEPH in Canberra and then as a lecturer in biostatistics in the School of Public Health at Curtin University of Technology in Perth (1992-6). We moved to Newcastle UK in 1992 and I worked there in several consulting and senior research associate positions, in the Statistics Department and the Medical School, though I visited Australia frequently and worked for several periods as a visiting lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at UWA.

While in Washington DC I was an assistant professor in the Department of Applied and Engineering Statistics at George Mason University in Virginia, and developed a new graduate course in survival analysis. In Melbourne I am working on a grant from the US Department of Education, and part-time on an ARC grant to Murray.

Research Interests:

My research grant from the National Center for Education Statistics, Washington DC is on identifiability of the ability distribution in item response theory models, and inference about individual and group ability from these models.

This involves maximum likelihood and computational developments in Stata. I am also working on random effects models and latent class modelling in applications to missing data on covariates in survival analysis.

Earlier work is on Bayesian (Markov Chain Monte Carlo) inference about the latent variable in the classical factor model.

Recent Funded Research:

Refereed Journal Articles:

Hochberg, Y., Marom, I. and Keret, R. (1983) On improved calibrations of unknowns in a system of quality controlled assays. Biometrics 39, 97-108.

Merlob, P., Mogilner, P.M., Muhlbauer, B., Aitkin, I. and Dulitzky, F. (1989) Time trends (1978-1986) of Anencephaly and Spina Bifida in four hospitals affiliated with the international clearinghouse: a warning. Israel Journal of Medical Sciences 25, 441-444.

Merlob, I. and Aitkin, I. (1990) Time trends (1980-1987) of 10 selected informative morphogenetic variants in a newborn population. Clinical Genetics 38, 33-37.

Litwin, A., Aitkin, I. and Merlob, P. (1991) Clitoral length assessment in newborn infants of 30 to 41 weeks gestational age. Eur. J. Obstet Gyn. and Rep. Biol . 38, 209-212.

Aitkin, M. and Aitkin, I. (1994) Review of SuperANOVA. Appl. Statist . 43, 422-427

Neufeld, M.Y., Blumen, S., Aitkin, I. and Kortzin, A.D. (1994) EEG frequency analysis in demented and nondemented Parkinson patients. Dementia 5, 23-28.

Aitkin, M. and Aitkin, I. (1996) A hybrid EM/Gauss-Newton algorithm for maximum likelihood in mixture distributions. Statist. and Computing 6, 127-130.

Rangan, A.M., Aitkin, I., Blight, G.D. and Binns, C.W. (1997) Factors affecting iron status in 15-30 year old female students. Asia Pacific J. Clin. Nutr . 6, 291-295.

Scott J.A., Aitkin I., Binns C.W. and Aroni, R.A. (1999) Factors associated with the duration of breast-feeding amongst women in Perth, Australia. Acta Paediatrica 88, 416-421.