Biostatistics are the development and application of statistical methods to a wide range of topics in biology. It encompasses the design of biological experiments, the collection and analysis of data from those experiments and the interpretation of the results.
Sir David John Spiegelhalter is a British statistician and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. From 2007 to 2018 he was Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Spiegelhalter is an ISI highly cited researcher.
Joseph L. Fleiss was an American professor of biostatistics at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, where he also served as head of the Division of Biostatistics from 1975 to 1992. He is known for his work in mental health statistics, particularly assessing the reliability of diagnostic classifications, and the measures, models, and control of errors in categorization.
Medical statistics deals with applications of statistics to medicine and the health sciences, including epidemiology, public health, forensic medicine, and clinical research. Medical statistics has been a recognized branch of statistics in the United Kingdom for more than 40 years but the term has not come into general use in North America, where the wider term 'biostatistics' is more commonly used. However, "biostatistics" more commonly connotes all applications of statistics to biology. Medical statistics is a subdiscipline of statistics. "It is the science of summarizing, collecting, presenting and interpreting data in medical practice, and using them to estimate the magnitude of associations and test hypotheses. It has a central role in medical investigations. It not only provides a way of organizing information on a wider and more formal basis than relying on the exchange of anecdotes and personal experience, but also takes into account the intrinsic variation inherent in most biological processes."
Statistical epidemiology is an emerging branch of the disciplines of epidemiology and biostatistics that aims to:
Sylvia Therese Richardson is a French/British Bayesian statistician and is currently Professor of Biostatistics and Director of the MRC Biostatistics Unit at the University of Cambridge. In 2021 she became the president of the Royal Statistical Society for the 2021–22 year.
David George Clayton, is a British statistician and epidemiologist. He is titular Professor of Biostatistics in the University of Cambridge and Wellcome Trust and Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Principal Research Fellow in the Diabetes and Inflammation Laboratory, where he chairs the statistics group. Clayton is an ISI highly cited researcher placing him in the top 250 most cited scientists in the mathematics world over the last 20 years.
Ravindra Khattree is an Indian-American statistician and a distinguished professor of statistics at Oakland University and a co-director of the Center for Data Science and Big Data Analytics at the same university. His contribution to the Fountain–Khattree–Peddada Theorem in Pitman measure of closeness is one of the important results of his work. Khattree is the coauthor of two books and has coedited two volumes. He has served as an associate editor of the Communications in Statistics journal and the editor of the Interstat online journal. He was Chief editor of Journal of Statistics and Applications for more than ten years. He is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association.
Tianwen Tony Cai is a Chinese statistician. He is the Daniel H. Silberberg Professor of Statistics and Vice Dean at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is also professor of Applied Math & Computational Science Graduate Group, and associate scholar at the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology & Informatics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. In 2008 Tony Cai was awarded the COPSS Presidents' Award.
Pranab Kumar Sen is a statistician, a professor of statistics and the Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Peter John Diggle, is a British statistician. He holds concurrent appointments with the Faculty of Health and Medicine at Lancaster University, and the Institute of Infection and Global Health at the University of Liverpool. From 2004 to 2008 he was an EPSRC Senior Research Fellow. He is one of the founding co-editors of the journal Biostatistics.
Sheila Macdonald Bird OBE FRSE FMedSci is a Scottish biostatistician whose assessment of misuse of statistics in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and BMJ series ‘Statistics in Question’ led to statistical guidelines for contributors to medical journals. Bird's doctoral work on non-proportional hazards in breast cancer found application in organ transplantation where beneficial matching was the basis for UK's allocation of cadaveric kidneys for a decade. Bird led the Medical Research Council (MRC) Biostatistical Initiative in support of AIDS/HIV studies in Scotland, as part of which Dr A. Graham Bird and she pioneered Willing Anonymous HIV Surveillance (WASH) studies in prisons. Her work with Cooper on UK dietary bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) exposure revealed that the 1940–69 birth cohort was the most exposed and implied age-dependency in susceptibility to clinical vCJD progression from dietary BSE exposure since most vCJD cases were younger, born in 1970–89. Bird also designed the European Union's robust surveillance for transmissible spongiform encephalopathies in sheep which revolutionised the understanding of scrapie.
Marvin Zelen was Professor Emeritus of Biostatistics in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH), and Lemuel Shattuck Research Professor of Statistical Science. During the 1980s, Zelen chaired HSPH's Department of Biostatistics. Among colleagues in the field of statistics, he was widely known as a leader who shaped the discipline of biostatistics. He "transformed clinical trial research into a statistically sophisticated branch of medical research."
Sudipto Banerjee is an Indian-American statistician best known for his work on Bayesian hierarchical modeling and inference for spatial data analysis. He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Biostatistics in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. He served as the 2022 President of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis.
Olive Jean Dunn was an American mathematician and statistician, and professor of biostatistics at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). She described methods for computing confidence intervals and also codified the Bonferroni correction's application to confidence intervals. She authored the textbook Basic Statistics: A Primer for the Biomedical Sciences in 1977.
Kathleen Rundle Lamborn is an American biostatistician, known for her highly-cited publications on glioma. She is an Adjunct Professor Emeritus of Neurological Surgery and former Director of the Cancer Center Biostatistics Core at the University of California, San Francisco, and Senior Scientific Consultant at Quintiles Pacific.
Daniela M. Witten is an American biostatistician. She is a professor and the Dorothy Gilford Endowed Chair of Mathematical Statistics at the University of Washington. Her research investigates the use of machine learning to understand high-dimensional data.
Thomas Lumley is an Australian statistician who serves as the chair of biostatistics at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Lumley is also a member of the "R Core Team."
Lisa Marie Sullivan is a biostatistician associated with the Framingham Heart Study. She is a professor of biostatistics at Boston University, where she is associate dean for education in the School of Public Health and the former chair of the biostatistics department.
