Mindel C. Sheps

Mindel Cherniack Sheps (May 20, 1913 – January 13, 1973)[1] was a Canadian physician, biostatistician and demographer. She held academic appointments at Harvard Medical School, University of Pittsburgh, Columbia University and UNC Chapel Hill, where she was Professor of Biostatistics.[2]

Mindel Cherniack Sheps
Sheps at UNC Chapel Hill c. 1968
Born(1913-05-20)20 May 1913
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Died13 January 1973(1973-01-13) (aged 59)
Durham, North Carolina, U.S.
Alma materUniversity of Manitoba (MD), UNC Chapel Hill (MPH)
Spouse(s)Cecil George Sheps (m. 1937)
Scientific career
FieldsMedicine, Biostatistics, Epidemiology, Demography
InstitutionsSimmons College, Harvard Medical School, University of Pittsburgh, Columbia University, UNC Chapel Hill

Biography

Sheps was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1913. Her parents, Joseph and Fanya (Golden) Cherniack,[3] were immigrants from southern Russia, and her brother, Saul Cherniack, became minister of finance in the Manitoba provincial government in the early 1970s. She married Cecil George Sheps in 1937.[4]

After obtaining her medical degree at the University of Manitoba 1936, she went into general practice from 1939 to 1944, and ran successfully for the Winnipeg School Board in 1942.[5] From 1944 to 1946, she was secretary to the health services planning commission of the government of Saskatchewan. In that position, Sheps was a key contributor to the Sigerist Report,[6][7] which led to Saskatchewan enacting the first government hospital insurance plan in North America in 1945.

Later, after a move to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, she began to study biostatistics, and held faculty positions at several universities before returning to UNC Chapel Hill in 1968, where she remained until her death in 1973.[2] In addition to her academic career, she served as an adviser to the Government of India through the Ford Foundation, and held an advisory role at World Health Organization.[1]

Research

Sheps' work has had significant influence on several academic fields. In epidemiology and biostatistics, Sheps' 1958 paper "Shall we count the living or the dead" contains one of the earliest discussions of challenges that arise from the asymmetry of the relative risk,[8] a phenomenon that may make the effect estimate sensitive to whether it is based on the probability of the outcome, or the probability of not having the outcome.

She devoted the last ten years of her life primarily to demography, a field in which she was largely self taught. Her work in demography was among the first to study the determinants of variation in family formation.[9] The Mindel C. Sheps award in mathematical demography is named in her honor.[10]

Selected publications
  • Sheps, M.C. (1958): "Shall we count the living or the dead?". New England Journal of Medicine 259:1210-1214.
  • Sheps, M.C., and Menken, J. A. "Mathematical Models of Conception and Birth". Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.

References
  1. "Mindel Sheps, Fertility Expert And Biostatistician, Dies at 59 (Published 1973)". The New York Times. 1973-01-17. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-11-18.
  2. Menken, Jane; Ridley, Jeanne Clare; Horvitz, Daniel (1973). "Obituary: Mindel C. Sheps 1913-1973". Population Index. 39 (4): 507–513. ISSN 0032-4701. JSTOR 2733835.
  3. "Memorable Manitobans: Joseph Alter Cherniack (1885-1972)". www.mhs.mb.ca. Retrieved 2020-11-24.
  4. "Mindel Cherniack Sheps". Jewish Women's Archive. Retrieved 2020-11-24.
  5. "An Album of Winnipeg Women". The Winnipeg Tribune.
  6. Commission, Saskatchewan Health Services Survey (1944). Report of the Commissioner, Henry E. Sigerist: Presented to the Minister of Public Health, October 4th, 1944. T.H. McConica, King's Printer.
  7. DUFFIN, JACALYN; FALK, LESLIE A. (1996). "Sigerist in Saskatchewan: The Quest for Balance in Social and Technical Medicine". Bulletin of the History of Medicine. 70 (4): 658–683. doi:10.1353/bhm.1996.0174. ISSN 0007-5140. JSTOR 44444726. PMID 9001113. S2CID 41033790.
  8. Walter, S. (2000). "Choice of effect measure for epidemiological data". Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. 53 (9): 931–939. doi:10.1016/S0895-4356(00)00210-9. PMID 11004419. S2CID 41254985.
  9. Menken, Jane (2020-06-01). "Mindel Sheps: Physician, health care activist, theoretical demographer". Theoretical Population Biology. 133: 71–74. doi:10.1016/j.tpb.2019.12.005. ISSN 0040-5809. PMID 31877309..
  10. "The Mindel C. Sheps award in mathematical demography". Demography. 12 (3): 570. 1975-08-01. doi:10.1007/BF03208353. ISSN 1533-7790. S2CID 46955023.
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