Felicity T. Enders

Felicity Enders fell in love with data and statistics while she was earning her Master of Public Health degree at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. As a result, she landed in the PhD biostatistics program there, as well.

In 2004, she moved to Minnesota from Washington, DC, to be with her then-fiancé while he completed his residency at the Mayo Clinic. She joined him with the understanding that, together, they would leave as soon as his residency was completed. Instead, she fell in love with both the clinic and Minnesota and has been there ever since.

Enders serves as lead statistician for the Mayo Clinic Center for Women’s Health and the inter-institutional Center for Chronic Disease Reduction and Equity Promotion Across Minnesota. Her personal research focuses on educating researchers. For about 15 years, this took the form of statistics education, in which she leveraged her award-winning expertise as a statistics educator to develop a national statistics education research team. While this team is ongoing, Enders’s research interests have transitioned to hidden curriculum for research—a topic that provides a novel lens for understanding and overcoming research barriers for diverse people—and survey-based life course measures of discrimination and stress, which she has developed and is testing with the goal of identifying individuals at risk of accelerated biological aging.

Enders’s proudest moment thus far has been her transition from teaching statistics to focusing on health equity and workforce diversity, equality, and inclusion as director of the Mayo Clinic Office for Research Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity and deputy director for equity, inclusion, and diversity in the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center. She is also program director for Mayo’s TL1 PhD program in the Center for Clinical and Translational Science and program director for the Minnesota Learning Health System K12 program.

“It’s always scary to jump into something new without knowing whether it will work,” Enders wrote. “I am incredibly thankful for all the people who have supported me in this transition. I believe there is a great deal to be done in this space, both statistically and otherwise, and I am excited to help move the field forward.”