Research

The Department of Biostatistics began 2020 by co-leading the Data Science for Public Health Summit at the Mailman School of Public Health in January. The Summit attracted national and international academic leaders in health data science. The key panelists included Dr. Kiros Berhane, the Department Chair, and Dr. Jeff Goldsmith, Associate Professor of Biostatistics. Despite all the difficulties arising since March 2020 from the unprecedented and still-on-going COVID pandemic, the Department has been making very strong progress on the research front.

Our faculty are leaders in methodological research on biostatistics and health data science fundamentals, including causal inference, machine learning, genomics, high-dimensional data inference, mobile health, clinical trials, environmental statistics, image and functional data analyses, and precision medicine. In 2020 and 2021, they have been remarkably successful in obtaining grants from NIH, NSF, and other external funding agencies for methodological innovations. These include six new research grants from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (Dr. Ying Kuen Cheung), National Human Genome Research Institute (Dr. Iuliana Ionita-Laza), National Institute on Aging (Drs. Iuliana Ionita-Laza and Ying Wei), National Institute of Mental Health (Dr. Yuanjia Wang), and National Science Foundation (Drs. Min Qian and Ian McKeague).

Besides methodological research, the Department of Biostatistics has always been a vital force that has advanced biomedical and public health research in collaborations with the Mailman School of Public Health, the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and other schools at Columbia University. We provide state-of-the-art quantitative expertise, ranging from study design and data analysis to implementation and dissemination to techniques that ensure the generalizability and reproducibility of research results. The Department currently supports collaborative research from 121 government grants, 12 private grants, 6 industry-sponsored trials, and beyond. These tremendous collaborative efforts lead to rich and impactful scholarly products. In calendar 2020 alone, we have published over 150 collaborative papers across all health and biomedical research domains.

Faculty in biostatistics also work at the frontier of public health and medicine, leading research teams investigating some of today’s most pressing health issues. During the COVID pandemic, faculty have actively engaged in COVID-related research, including assisting clinical trials of potential treatments, building prediction models for prevalence and resurgences, analyzing the effect of natural experiments on pandemic responses, building a COVID dashboard, and community outreach. Dr. Shing Lee is the leader of a team of faculty and students which has developed a widely consulted interactive dashboard named Demographics by State COVID-19 Reporting (DSCovR), launched in June 2020. Dr. Qixuan Chen and her students have developed the NYC Neighborhoods COVID-19 Dashboard. These dashboards allow policymakers, scientists, and the public to track and visualize the time trend of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths by neighborhoods and demographic factors. With her PhD student Qingxia Wang and post-doctoral fellow Shanghong Xie, Dr. Yuanjia Wang has developed an innovative Survival Convolution Model (SurvCon) to forecast COVID-19 cases and deaths. Their work has received national attention and is in the COVID-19 Forecast Hub, used by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to help shape national public health policies.

For their world-class research and leadership on many fronts, our faculty have received several national and international awards in 2020 and 2021. Dr. Jeff Goldsmith received the prestigious COPSS Leadership Academy Award for emerging leaders in statistics and the Dean’s Excellence in Leadership Award from the Mailman School. Dr. Yifei Sun received the Outstanding Young Researcher Award from the International Chinese Statistical Association (ICSA). Dr. Ying Wei was elected to both the IMS (Institution of Mathematical Science) and the ISI (International Statistical Institute) Fellows. These are just to name a few!

Moving forward, the Department of Biostatistics is committed to leading and advancing health data science at Columbia, and to promoting team science and expanding interdisciplinary collaborations, while maintaining its theoretical values and statistical principles to ensure interpretable, actionable, generalizable, and equitable health data science for all. The Department has launched several initiatives to achieve this goal. In partnership with CTSA-BERD, we have implemented a pilot project—led by Drs. Shing Lee and Cheng-Shiun Leu—to expand the in-house masters level analyst group. Two excellent analysts, Julia Thompson and Jared Garfinkel, have joined us this year, and we will have more hires in the coming year. We have also launched initiatives to support and facilitate interdisciplinary multiple-PI multiple-project grant applications. Beyond this, we have introduced next-generation cloud computing to support future health data science research; and we have an active ongoing faculty search with multiple open-rank positions to bring new ideas and expertise to our already-strong research profile. With these and other collective efforts from all of our biostatistics faculty, students, and research staff, we expect to see more exciting changes and news in the coming years. Stay tuned!