2024 Letter from the Chair

It is my great honor to share our warmest greetings and new year wishes alongside the 2024 issue of our newsletter, which highlights major events and the many stellar achievements by members of our department during the past year. This has been an exceptionally productive year for the department across all dimensions of its multi-faceted goals and objectives.  The groundbreaking research innovations by our faculty and trainees has been highly visible and impactful, nationally and globally – covering several key areas in methodologic innovations and application of cutting-edge techniques as part of transdisciplinary teams across Mailman, CUIMC and beyond. Our educational activities have been equally impactful and productive through a dynamic curricular review process and training that also embeds hands-on work on a complex array of data structures. This issue covers a representative set of notable accomplishments by the department’s faculty, trainees, and dedicated staff members.  

Our department has continued to produce high-quality peer reviewed publications featuring innovative new methodological approaches and state-of-the-art collaborative interdisciplinary research. This year, as you will read in the grants section of the newsletter, the growth in our grant portfolio has been outstanding and in a consistently upward trajectory. This was due to many factors, including (1) initiatives by the highly productive existing and newly hired faculty, organized around vibrant working groups and guided by a newly formed Research Advisory Committee (chaired by our Vice Chair of Research, Dr. Ying Wei), (2) a pilot grant initiative that provides funds for grant preparation via robust external peer-review process that has benefitted applicants – with many already successful, and (3) an enhanced mechanism for mentoring junior faculty that is now based on a 3-member committee. 

The department continues to take significant bold steps towards asserting leadership in public health data science at Columbia and beyond – most recent and notable of all being the establishment of the schoolwide Translational Artificial Intelligence Lab (TRAIL), led by our Vice Chair of Research Dr. Ying Wei. Both Dr. Jeff Goldsmith and I worked with Vice Dean Gary Miller to organize the third public health data science summit in January 2024, and several members of our faculty led and participated in key panels. We are now getting ready to hold the fourth summit on January 31, 2025.  This fourth summit will feature a Keynote address, “Statistical opportunities to improve healthcare: analytic infrastructure, Bayesian hierarchical models, and major challenges,” from Scott L. Zeger, PhD, John C. Malone Professor, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It will also have several carefully planned panels for advancing public health data science and the fast-evolving field of AI for health at Mailman and beyond.   

We are gearing up to hold the second Columbia Biostatistics Annual Research Symposium (CBARS) in Spring 2025 (details forthcoming) to continue highlighting the cutting-edge methodologic research being conducted by departmental faculty and trainees, to promote collaboration and synergy on key thematic areas of strength, to showcase the research being conducted by trainees (Masters, Pre-doctoral and Post-doctoral), and to recognize excellence within the department (and broadly in fields of Biostatistics and Health Data Science). Building on the success from the inaugural CBARS of Fall 2023, we will continue to use this platform to engage key partners from across Columbia for deliberations and strategic planning on enhancing our educational programs and maximizing research resources and infrastructures, and to meaningfully engage departmental alumni.   

I am pleased to report that three of our outstanding faculty members were promoted in the past year; namely, Dr. Shing Lee (to Full Professor), Dr. Christine Mauro (to Associate Professor) and Dr. Yifei Sun (to Associate Professor, with Tenure). On the staff side, Anthony Guerrero has been promoted to a well-deserved position as Senior Grants Administrator. I am pleased to welcome two new staff members, Lucia Li and Cynthia Rubiera. Please join me in congratulating all those who were promoted for the well-deserved achievements and in welcoming the new additions. 

Our educational offerings continue to attract high caliber trainees across all degree programs and our two pipeline programs for undergraduate students. In addition to our successful MS program - one of the largest in the country - and our thriving MPH program, our new PhD cohort had one of its largest incoming classes with 7 students. Our pioneering Biostatistics and Epidemiology Summer Training (BEST) program, now in its 16th year, focuses on increasing the number of trainees in both biostatistics and epidemiology. This year, this program had a cohort of 14 students from across the nation. Our Summer Institute for Biostatistics and Data Science at Columbia (SIBDS@Columbia), also NIH funded and which I have the pleasure of co-directing with colleague Dr. Christine Mauro, had a record cohort of 15 students from around the country for training on various aspects of data science for health and research immersion with world class biomedical research scientists from across Columbia University. The professional development of our graduate students and postdoctoral fellows continues to be enhanced via vibrant student programs such as the Computing Club and Graduate Student Research Seminars. Our graduating MS and MPH students participated in a day-long Practicum Symposium for the fourth year in a row with sessions chaired by our PhD students. As part of our NIH-Fogarty funded APHREA-DST grant that I lead as a Principal Investigator, we are training a new generation of public health data scientists at the University of Nairobi (Kenya) and Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia). The first cohort of MS students graduated from University of Nairobi (Kenya) in September 2024. And finally, our educational leadership team has been restructured to welcome Dr. Yuanjia Wang as new PhD Program Director, replacing Dr. Qixuan Chen. 

In September 2024, our department was honored to co-host (along with the Columbia Department of Statistics), STATFEST 2024, an annual event that is organized by American Statistical Association Committee on Minorities, with Dr. Tian Zheng (Chair of Columbia Biostatistics) and I serving as Co-Chairs of the Local Organizing Committee along with Erin Elliott and Paul McCullough providing critical support. This event attracted a very large number of undergraduates from across the country along with several exhibitors, keynote speakers and panelists. Several of our own alumni were part of the panels.  

I am pleased to report that the achievements of the department continue to garner recognition by our colleagues nationally and beyond - a testament to the high caliber of research and overall scholarship by departmental faculty, and the visionary and dynamically revised curricula of all our educational programs. Of note, we were recently selected by the American Statistical Association to be featured for the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) TV 2024 Thought Leadership Film Series. I invite you all to watch this video and to disseminate it widely within your circles. 

We hope that this issue will, at least partially, provide you with a picture of the department’s remarkable growth and achievements in fulfilling its academic mission. The future does indeed look very bright. As you browse the newsletter, I hope that you will share my enthusiasm for the future of the department as evidenced by the examples of notable and selected examples of departmental activities by our outstanding staff, world renowned faculty,  talented trainees and distinguished alumni who continue to make impactful contributions to advancing public health through their quantitative input and via training the next generation of quantitative and transdisciplinary scientists.   

I feel immense pride in, and am privileged to continue leading, such a world-class department. On behalf of the department, I gratefully acknowledge the superb support from MSPH and CUIMC leadership, and the outstanding collegiality within the department that assures a cultivating, nurturing, and inviting environment for all its members. Finally, I also want to express deep appreciation and gratitude to all those who support the department’s mission – and especially the Sanford Bolton Estate, the family of Roslyn and Leslie Goldstein, and the family of Cynthia and Robe rt Citrone for their impactful support. As always, I close by inviting all of you to remain engaged with the department. We hope to have the privilege of hosting you as visitors, and, hopefully, to share your knowledge and wisdom as potential collaborators, new colleagues and/or future trainees at all levels.