Stephanie Cook

Affiliation: New York University James Weldon Johnson Professor
Assistant Professor, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Department of Biostatistics
Director, Attachment and Health Research Lab, School of Global Public Health

Stephanie Cook is from a Detroit suburb and was interested in math and science as a girl. However, math did not come easy for her because she has mild dyscalculia—a disability that impairs a person’s ability to learn number-related concepts—which was not diagnosed until her late elementary years. Thus, it took her longer to do math, although she excelled at it. For most of her life, Cook kept it relatively secret that she struggled with this condition. In college, she took no math classes and only one statistics class due to her fear of numbers.

However, she recommitted to math and, later, statistics her senior year at the university of Michigan, where she was paired with mentor Marc Zimmerman. He introduced Cook to public health research, and it was through the minority health international research training program that she connected math and statistics to real-world issues. Indeed, she earned an MPH in sociomedical science at Columbia University with a focus on research methods and statistics and later completed her DrPH in the same program.

Cook’s accomplishments have been many throughout her career, but her proudest academic moments have been when she was named the MLK Outstanding Research Mentor, when she received the New York University Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Faculty Award, and when she was named a New York University James Weldon Johnson Professor.