Marie Diener-West
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has appointed Marie Diener-West as a Bloomberg Centennial Professor.
Diener-West is the Helen Abbey and Margaret Merrell Professor of Biostatistical Education and chairs the school’s master of public health program, a position she has held since 2008.
Diener-West has long focused on the statistical education of health professionals. Since 1990, she has taught courses in introductory statistical methods and data analysis, earning eight Golden Apple Awards, an annual award given by Bloomberg School students in recognition of excellence in teaching. In 1997, she developed and co-instructed the school’s first distance-education course, Quantitative Methods.
“Dr. Diener-West’s expert leadership of the MPH program has been tremendous, as has her longstanding dedication to biostatistics education,” said Ellen J. MacKenzie, dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “We extend our warmest congratulations to Dr. Diener-West on this honor.”
Much of Diener-West’s professional career has focused on the design, conduct, and analysis of multicenter clinical trials. For 20 years, she was the study statistician and deputy director of the Coordinating Center for the Collaborative Ocular Melanoma Study, a set of long-term multicenter clinical trials sponsored by the National Eye Institute at the National Institutes of Health. The trials, conducted at 43 clinical centers, investigated the effectiveness of different radiation treatments on prolonging survival and other outcomes of patients with choroidal melanoma, a cancer of the back of the eye. These research findings changed the practice of treatment and management for this disease.
Other research interests include cystic fibrosis and the longitudinal relationship between sleep disorders and subsequent heart disease in the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s Sleep Heart Health Study. She is a member of the faculty of the Johns Hopkins Center for Clinical Trials and Evidence Synthesis at the Bloomberg School. She is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and Society for Clinical Trials.
Read more about Diener-West’s appointment.
Erin Tanenbaum
Erin Tanenbaum was awarded the Committee on Applied Statisticians’ (CAS) first letter of recognition of exceptional service. Tanenbaum joined the committee in 2009 after attending a JSM social mixer. She became the first CAS vice chair before serving as chair in 2010.
An active leader, Tanenbaum helped develop the “Friends of CAS,” presented at JSM, participated in the Career Success Factors Workgroup as part of Bob Rodriguez’s presidential initiative and the YouTube video contest as part Nancy Geller’s presidential initiative. In 2013, she helped lead CAS in developing a mentoring program that spearheaded David Morganstein’s 2015 presidential initiative on mentoring.
Tanenbaum continued to contribute by initiating CAS’s “collaboration initiative” via the JSM panel discussion titled “Roadmap for Promoting Statistical Collaboration” in 2016. This initiative eventually developed into the 10 webinar series on different nontechnical skills for successful collaborations.
Tannenbaum has been an influential contributor to CAS and demonstrated leadership, empowerment, and collaboration that remains a cornerstone in the CAS culture. CAS is pleased to acknowledge her as the committee’s first recipient of a letter of recognition of exceptional service.
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