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Decision Modeling for Biomedical Applications Medical decision making is evolving from an "art" to an evidence-- and model--based scientific discipline. Physicians, patients, counselors, policy makers, and insurance companies are facing complex problems and they are addressing them based on an increasingly large amount of data. The goal if this course is to explore the quantitative foudations of raional decision making and statistical decision theory, and illustrate in practice how these can contribute to the solution of important and complex problems in the health sciences. The course is perhaps best described as a ``tour guide'' to some of the ideas and papers that have contributed to making decision theory so fascinating and important. I selected a set of papers, and developed self contained lecture notes (which will be available) around each one. Naturally, many wonderful articles have been left out of the tour. My goal was to select a set that would work well in conveying an overall view of the fields and controversies, rather than to select `greatest hits'. I will attempt to put the contributions of each article in perspective and to highlight developments that followed. I also developed a consistent and reasonably unified notation for the entire material and emphasized the relationships among different disciplines and points of view. But all lectures will try to preserve the viewpoint and flavor of the original contributions. I designed our tour of decision theoretic ideas so that a student/reader might emerge with an overall philosophy of decision making and statistics, and appreciate thir relevance for policy and cliical decision making. Ideally that philosophy will be the students' own, and will be the result of contact with key ideas and controversies in several different fields. With very few exceptions, the mathematical level of the course is basic. Advanced calculus and intermediate statistical inference are useful prerequisites, but an enterprising student can profit from the course even without this background. The challenging aspect of the course lies in the swift pace at which each lecture introduces new and different concepts and points of view.