This interview is with Cancer Infomatics editorial board member Dr Jimmy T. Efird. Cancer Informatics is an open access journal published by Libertas Academica.

Editor in Chief Dr James Willey has recently issued a call for papers

What is the primary focus of your research?

Methods for designing Gene-environment interaction studies, techniques to adjust for multiplicity, and modelling of season of birth effects.

What are the most exciting developments arising from current research in your area?

Efficient method to compute 95% multiplicity confidence intervals for odds ratio estimates.

Who are your main collaborators? Please describe your work with them.

Susan Searles Nelson at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. Miki Hong, UCSF School of Medicine.

How did you come to be working in your research area?

I started out working in the Department of Radiation Oncology at MGH/Harvard Medical School. The importance of efficient multiplicity adjustment in cancer studies quickly became clear given the need to examine multiple risk factors.

What do you think about the development of open access publishing? Have you published in an open access journal? What motivated you to do so?

Open access journals have the advantage of more rapid publication of ground breaking research and the universal access to articles.

What articles and/or books have you published recently?

Efird J, Searles Nielsen S. A method to compute multiplicity corrected confidence intervals for odds ratios and other relative effect estimates. IJERPH 2008;5:394-398.

Efird J, Searles Nielsen S. A method to model season of birth as a surrogate environmental risk factor for disease. IJERPH 2008;5(1):49-53.

Efird J, Hong M. Computing differential sample size for case-control studies of gene-environment interaction. Disease and Ethnicity 2008;18:(s2)25-29.

Efird J, Holly E, Cordier S, Mueller B, Lubin F, Filippini G, Peris-Bonet R, McCredie M, Arslan A, Bracci P, Preston-Martin S. Beauty product- related exposures and childhood brain-tumors in seven countries: results from the SEARCH international brain-tumor study. J Neurooncol 2005;72:133-147.

Efird J. A method for indirectly estimating gene-environment effect modification and power given only genotype frequency and odds ratio of environmental exposure. European Journal of Epidemiology 2005;20:389-393.

Efird J, Friedman G, Sidney S, Klatsky A, Habel L, Udaltsova N, Van Den Eeden S, Nelson L. The risk of primary adult-onset brain cancer associated with cigarettee smoking and other lifestyle behaviors in a large, multi-ethnic, managed care cohort. J Neurooncol 68:57-69, 2004.

Efird J, Holly E, Preston-Martin S, Mueller B, Lubin F, Filippini G, Peris-Bonet R, McCredie M, Cordier S, Arslan A, Bracci P. Farm-related exposures and childhood brain-tumor risk in seven countries: Results from the SEARCH International Brain Tumor Study. Paediatr Perinat Epidemiol 17(2):201-211, 2003.

Efird J, Friedman G, Habel L, Tekawa I, Nelson LM. Risk of subsequent cancer following invasive or in situ squamous cell skin cancer. Annals of Epidemiology 12:469-475, 2002.