Biostatistics is a branch of statistics that applies 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.
Lowell Jacob Reed was 7th president of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He was born in Berlin, New Hampshire, the son of Jason Reed, a millwright and farmer, and Louella Coffin Reed.
Jerome Cornfield (1912–1979) was an American statistician. He is best known for his work in biostatistics, but his early work was in economic statistics and he was also an early contributor to the theory of Bayesian inference. He played a role in the early development of input-output analysis and linear programming. Cornfield played a crucial role in establishing the causal link between smoking and incidence of lung cancer. He introduced the Rare disease assumption and the "Cornfield condition" that allows one to assess whether an unmeasured (binary) confounder can explain away the observed relative risk due to some exposure like smoking.
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."
Dr. Moyses Szklo is a Brazilian epidemiologist and physician scientist. He is currently University Distinguished Service Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University, Editor-in-chief Emeritus of the American Journal of Epidemiology, and director of the Johns Hopkins Summer Institute of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Szklo has published over 300 articles in peer-reviewed journals as well as a major textbook of epidemiology. He has led several major epidemiologic societies and studies and has been lecturing and leading courses all over the world, including Spain, Italy, Israel, Brazil, and Mexico.
Nilanjan Chatterjee is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Biostatistics and Genetic Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University, with appointments in the Department of Biostatistics in the Bloomberg School of Public Health and in the Department of Oncology in the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He was formerly the chief of the Biostatistics Branch of the National Cancer Institute's Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics.
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 of Biostatistics and Senior Associate Dean in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. He served as the Chair of the Department of Biostatistics at UCLA from 2014 through 2023. He served as the elected President of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis in 2022.
Rafael Irizarry is a professor of biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and professor of biostatistics and computational biology at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute. Irizarry is known as one of the founders of the Bioconductor project.
Karen Jean Bandeen-Roche is an American biostatistician known for her research on aging and aging-related frailty. She is Hurley Dorrier Professor of Biostatistics and Chair of the Biostatistics Department at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Francesca Dominici is a Harvard Professor who develops methodology in causal inference and data science and led research projects that combine big data with health policy and climate change. She is a professor of biostatistics, co-director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, and a former senior associate dean for research in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Vicki Stover Hertzberg is an American biostatistician, who is currently professor in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing of Emory University, where she founded and continues to direct its Center for Data Science. Previously she worked as a professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics in the Rollins School of Public Health of Emory University between 1994 and 2015, serving as the department chair 1994-2001.
Margaret Merrell was an American biostatistician who taught at Johns Hopkins University for many years and became the first female full professor in the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. She is known for her research with Lowell Reed on the construction of life tables. She also observed that, for longitudinal data on individuals, fitting a curve to each individual and then averaging the parameters describing the curve will typically give different results than averaging the data values of the individuals and fitting a single curve to the averaged data.
Jeffrey Tullis Leek is an American biostatistician and data scientist working as a Vice President, Chief Data Officer, and Professor at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He is an author of the Simply Statistics blog, and runs several online courses through Coursera, as part of their Data Science Specialization. His most popular course is The Data Scientist's Toolbox, which he instructed along with Roger Peng and Brian Caffo. Leek is best known for his contributions to genomic data analysis and critical view of research and the accuracy of popular statistical methods.
Helen Abbey was an American biostatistician known for her research on the health effects of radiation and on infections among Native Americans, and for her prolific mentoring of students in statistics. She was affiliated with Johns Hopkins University for over 50 years.
Roger D. Peng is an author and professor of Statistics and Data Science at the University of Texas at Austin. Peng originally received a Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics from Yale University in 1999, before going on to study at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he completed a Master of Science in Statistics in 2001 and a PhD in Statistics in 2003. The focus of his research has been on environmental health, specifically focusing on air pollution and climate change in his research. Peng is also a software engineer who has authored numerous R packages focused on applying statistical methods necessary for a variety of topics. He has also created numerous resources including books, online courses, podcasts, blogs, and other articles to aid those learning data analysis.
Diana Lynn Miglioretti is an American biostatistician specializing in the availability and effectiveness of breast cancer screening and in radiation hazards from medical imaging; she has also studied connections between Down syndrome and leukemia. She is Dean's Professor of Public Health Sciences and head of the biostatistics division in the UC Davis School of Medicine. She co-leads the U.S. Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium.
Joanne Katz is an epidemiologist, biostatistician, and Professor of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She holds joint appointments in the Departments of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Ophthalmology. Her expertise is in maternal, neonatal, and child health. She has contributed to the design, conduct and analysis of data from large community based intervention trials on nutritional and other interventions in Indonesia, Philippines, Bangladesh, Nepal and other countries.
Rebecca Allana Hubbard is an American biostatistician whose research interests include observational studies and the use of electronic health record data in public health analysis and decision-making, accounting for the errors in this type of data. She is a professor of biostatistics in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
Ronald S. Brookmeyer is an American public health researcher. He is a professor of biostatistics at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.
Fan Li is a Chinese-American biostatistician whose research includes causal inference and propensity score matching, and their application to comparative effectiveness research in health care. She is a professor in the Duke University Department of Statistical Science, with a secondary appointment in Duke's Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics.
