Melody Goodman began her undergraduate studies as a pre-med student. During her first semester, she heard senior pre-med students talking about cat lab, where you dissect a cat, and she dropped the pre-med major the next day. After a long period of being undecided, she changed her major to applied mathematics and statistics. She fell in love with combinatorics and game theory and eventually landed a job on Wall Street; she didn’t like it. After googling “math in health,” she learned about biostatistics and went to graduate school. She is now the associate dean for research and an associate professor of biostatistics at the NYU School of Global Public Health and working to educate the general public about quantitative public health data literacy and expose racial and ethnically diverse students to biostatistics and data science.

New York University Abu Dhabi and the Upjohn Division of Pfizer Inc. work to build scientific research capacity in the United Arab Emirates. The long-term vision of the partnership is to harness observational data, randomized clinical trials, and analytical skills to generate real-world evidence to advance the prevention and management of noncommunicable diseases.

The 13th Symposium on Statistics in Psychiatry honored the late Thomas R. Ten Have, a founding member of the conference and an active member of the program committee.