September 2008 Fisher/Shafer NONMEM Workshop in San Francisco

Dear Colleagues: Dennis Fisher and I are pleased to announce the 8th "Fisher/Shafer NONMEM Workshop" to be held in San Francisco in September, 2008. Course Dates: Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 through Sunday, September 21st, 2008. Course Location: San Francisco, California Course Web Site: http://www.nonmemcourse.com Course Description: The Fisher/Shafer NONMEM Workshop covers NONMEM VI, data handling, model building, and model diagnostics. The workshop includes an extensive set of example problems ranging from simple didactic examples to demonstrate basic concepts to complex examples from the instructors' own experiences. Registrants are provided with a comprehensive set of graphical tools programmed in the R statistical language to create high-quality diagnostic and analysis plots. Registrants are also given Windows scripts to organize NONMEM analyses and provide audit trails. The distinguishing characteristic of this workshop is that each individual brings his or her laptop computer. A copy of NONMEM, the GNU Fortran Compiler, Windows and UNIX scripts, the full set of examples, R, and the graphics scripts developed by Drs. Fisher and Shafer are all provided to the users on a USB drive (flash drive). The entire course is run from the USB drive, leaving no footprint on the registrant's computer. NONMEM is removed at the end of the course, but the other software is in the public domain and may be kept after the course. The registrant follows along with the instructors, running examples on his or her laptop as the instructor works through the concepts. Attendees may also keep the course materials (course booklets, PowerPoint files, help files, examples, and a sizeable collection of reprints) for subsequent reference. Although a wide variety of NONMEM examples are provided for training, most participants bring real data from their work to the course. Typically these are data sets that require complex models unfamiliar to the participants, or are data that have been refractory to conventional modeling approaches. The course provides an opportunity for participants to review their data with the course instructors. Typically users leave the course with the tools required to model their data and with insight into the reason the data were difficult to model. The workshop runs from Thursday morning until Sunday noon. Each day includes 6 hours of instruction, ending at 3 pm. From 3 pm until 5 pm, registrants work on either the example problems, or on a data set of the registrant's choosing (frequently a difficult problem from work). The course is intended for individuals at the intermediate level. Those without substantial NONMEM experience are urged to sign up for the beginner's workshop described below. This should be adequate preparation to allow the novice to follow the main workshop. Because NONMEM is such a flexible tool, experienced NONMEM users have found the NONMEM Workshop valuable. In part, this is because the course instructors bring their unique perspectives to the application of NONMEM to data analysis. It is also because of the breadth of examples provided. Experienced users will find the introduction on Wednesday afternoon too basic, but they may find the R workshop on Wednesday morning to be useful. Wednesday Half-Day Courses Introduction to R Wednesday, 8 am - noon This course, given Wednesday morning, covers the R statistical programming language. Within the regular workshop, all participants will be introduced to the use of R to create diagnostic graphics for NONMEM. However, minimal time will be devoted to understanding the code used in these graphics. This course provides a more extensive introduction to the use of R (and the closely related language S-Plus). R is a remarkable tool for data management, graphics, and statistics. This session will focus on the use of R to read data, assemble a NONMEM dataset, perform basic statistics, and generate graphics. Introduction to NONMEM Wednesday 1 pm - 5 pm For those with little or no prior experience with NONMEM, we will provide a ½ day session on the Wednesday afternoon before the course to prepare you for the Intermediate course described above. Registrants will be taught the basics of NONMEM: 1) constructing a control stream, 2) constructing a data file, and 3) running NONMEM. The course description, schedule, and application for the workshop be found at http://www.nonmemcourse.com. Sincerely, Steven L. Shafer, MD Professor of Anesthesiology, Columbia University Adjunct Professor of Anesthesia, Stanford University Adjunct Professor of Biopharmaceutical Sciences, UCSF Editor-in-Chief, Anesthesia & Analgesia