Sherri Rose

Sherri Rose
Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School
Co-Director, Health Policy Data Science Lab

Educational Background
NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow, The Johns Hopkins University
PhD, Biostatistics, University of California, Berkeley
BS, Statistics, The George Washington University

Sherri Rose grew up in a tough situation in South Jersey, replete with poverty and home violence. Adjusting to college life surrounded by peers who did not understand her background was a struggle amidst her food insecurity and lack of social support. She longed for purpose, but was laser-focused on her courses (in between various part-time jobs) in hopes of a path to stable future employment. Having been evicted twice as a child, Rose never wanted to be evicted again.

Originally a pre-med mechanical and aerospace engineering major, Rose took a statistics course her second semester and immediately saw the utility of the discipline for solving problems in health. She later changed her major to statistics and was part of the first-ever cohort of undergraduates to attend the Summer Institute for Training in Biostatistics (SIBS) at Boston University. It was at SIBS that she solidified her determination to earn a PhD and finally felt like she had found the right path for her.

Rose gravitated toward broad frameworks that could be adapted to solve crucial problems in population health as a doctoral student at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation developed nonparametric machine learning estimators for case-control studies. After an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at The Johns Hopkins University, she joined Harvard Medical School as faculty in health care policy and statistics. Rose’s work is centered on developing and integrating advanced computational approaches for health economics, policy, and outcomes. She currently holds several leadership positions, including co-editor of the journal Biostatistics, chair of the ASA Biometrics Section, and co-director of the Health Policy Data Science Lab.

Rose is proud to contribute to many initiatives aimed at increasing diversity in the mathematical and health sciences. This has included serving as a faculty mentor in the Summer Program in Biostatistics and Computational Biology, Fostering Advancement and Careers Through Enrichment Training in Science, and Math Alliance’s Facilitated Graduate Applications Program, as well as presenting educational and career-related topics at SACNAS, StatFest, and the Women in Statistics and Data Science Conference.