Marie Diener-West

Helen Abbey and Margaret Merrell Professor of Biostatistics Education, Department of Biostatistics, and Chair, Master of Public Health Program, Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health

Marie Diener-West grew up in a Chicago suburb and went to Loyola University of Chicago as an undergraduate. She started out as a biology major but quickly added mathematics as a double major. It was not until her senior year that her physical chemistry professor suggested she consider graduate school. Many hours were spent in the library, paging through large books of graduate programs, before she discovered biostatistics programs. This prompted her to attend Johns Hopkins as a PhD student in Baltimore, where she has lived ever since.

The combination of a summer job at the Hines VA Cooperative Studies Coordinating Center and a course by Curt Meinert on clinical trials piqued her research interests, which include the design, conduct, and analysis of multicenter clinical trials and longitudinal studies. She spent three years with the radiation therapy oncology group at Hopkins, as well as time with the Collaborative Ocular Melanoma Study and the Sleep Heart Health Study Data Coordinating Centers.

“I have a long-standing passion for biostatistics education,” said Diener-West. “I am probably most proud of the longevity of my teaching.” Since 1990, she has been one of the lead instructors for the introductory statistical methods course sequence for non-biostatistics graduate students at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. In 1997, she co-developed the school’s first online course in quantitative methods and then found herself co-developing a set of online courses during the pandemic in 2020. Students have kept her motivated and engaged and constantly learning new tools and methods. Outside Baltimore, she has taught short courses at the University of Washington in Seattle, American University of Armenia in Yerevan, and Kyoto University in Japan.

Since 2008, Diener-West has served as the chair (director) of the school-wide Master of Public Health program of both full-time and part-time students at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. “This administrative role, combined with teaching, has certainly expanded my skill set in many different ways and given me such rich school-wide perspectives and experiences,” she said.

Diener-West is extremely thankful for her career and everyone who has supported her over the years—chairs, deans, colleagues, friends, and, importantly, family. “I’m not sure where I would have ended up if my physical chemistry professor had not made that simple suggestion,” she said.