Professor Marek Kimmel teamed with Olga Gorlova, associate professor of epidemiology at MD Anderson, and former Rice doctoral student Millennia Foy, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, as part of the NCI-sponsored Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network (CISNET).

The network, which included the Rice-MD Anderson team and five teams across the world, used a comparative modeling approach in which they constructed detailed cigarette smoking histories for people born from 1890 through 1970, and then related the histories to lung cancer mortality in mathematical models. Using these models, the researchers were able to estimate the impact of changes in smoking patterns resulting from tobacco-control activities on lung cancer deaths from 1975 through 2000.