Rebecca Hubbard, University of Pennsylvania and Chair of the Award Committee, and Jaya M. Satagopan, Rutgers University

The Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies Elizabeth L. Scott Award committee recently honored Madhu Mazumdar of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai with the 2022 award. Mazumdar was selected for serving as an outstanding role model of leadership and creating new leadership opportunities for statisticians, fostering opportunities in statistics and promoting statistical careers for diverse trainees, training and mentoring the next generation of statistical leaders, and excelling in team science research.

The award will be presented at the 2022 Joint Statistical Meetings in Washington, DC, where Mazumdar will deliver the Scott Lecture, “Biostatistical Methods and Team Science: Generating Evidence for Optimization of Clinical Practice.”

Mazumdar is professor of biostatistics at the Center of Biostatistics, Department of Population Health Science and Policy, and director of the Institute for Healthcare Delivery Science at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She was born and raised in India, where she earned her MA in statistics from the University of Delhi. She later earned an MS in mathematics from the University of Pittsburgh and a PhD in mathematical statistics from Penn State University. She also received training in leadership from Drexel University through the Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine Fellowship.

From 1991 to 2004, Mazumdar worked as assistant and associate attending biostatistician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where she established a formal team of master’s-level staff biostatisticians and served as the inaugural head of this team. In 2004, she moved to Weill-Cornell School of Medicine to establish the division of biostatistics and epidemiology within the department of public health. In 2014, she was recruited to the Mount Sinai Health System to develop and lead the Institute for Healthcare Delivery Science.

Mazumdar’s research is inspired by statistical applications in health science. Three important application areas for her work include oncology, orthopedic surgery, and translational science. She has made substantial contributions to meta-analysis, predictive modeling, and clinical trials and published more than 320 peer-reviewed papers. She has also led the biostatistics cores of various extramural federal grants.

Mazumdar is a recipient of the Team Science Award, sponsored by the American Federation of Medical Research, Association for Clinical Research Training, Association for Patient Oriented Research, and Society for Clinical and Translational Science. She was elected a fellow of the ASA in 2013.

Throughout her career, Mazumdar has served as a devoted mentor to numerous early-career investigators in biostatistics, oncology, and other areas of the health sciences with a focus on helping early-career women. She has fostered opportunities in the statistics profession for a diverse group of more than 110 researchers. She was program chair of the ASA’s Section on Statistics in Epidemiology, a member of the ASA’s Development Committee, and currently serves as the ASA representative on the AMS-ASA-MAA-SIAM Joint Data Committee.

Mazumdar is deeply involved in multiple diversity initiatives and has made pivotal contributions to addressing salary equity issues by assisting her home institutions in conducting salary reviews, which have led to policy changes and strategies for recruiting women leaders. She has developed and reformed multiple biostatistics units. She collaborated with the biostatistical leadership of multiple clinical and translational sciences centers and developed a framework for evaluating team scientists and fostering an environment in which members of biostatistics units engaged in team science can thrive professionally.

Through all these activities, Mazumdar has served as a role model. Many of her mentees are now thriving as leaders in the statistics profession and emulating her by promoting the careers of the next generation of researchers.

At JSM, Mazumdar will speak about innovative statistical applications to catalyze health care delivery, addressing two specific challenges facing US health care: 1) how to choose patients for knee-replacement surgery who will benefit most in terms of their quality of life and the cost-effectiveness of the procedure and 2) how to improve quality of cancer care through modeling of incurred cost. Mazumdar will highlight the critical role of statistical methods in addressing these challenges and illustrate how collaboration guided with principles of team science provide opportunities for practicing leadership, embracing diversity, managing conflict, and sharing credit.