Melody Goodman, Jemar Bather, Xiangying Chu, Marcello Pagano, Christine Plepys, and Ronnie Sebro recently published a paper titled “Racial and Ethnic Diversity Among Students, Graduates, and Faculty in Biostatistics and Epidemiology, 2010–2020” in Public Health Reports. We had a few questions for lead author Melody Goodman, who is the associate dean for research and professor of biostatistics at New York University School of Global Public Health. Check out here answers here.
public health
Xihong Lin: On the Front Lines of COVID-19 Research
Xihong Lin, biostatistics and statistics professor at Harvard University, and her former post-doctoral fellow, Chaolong Wang, worked day and night to help the world understand COVID-19, what happened in Wuhan, and the steps it took to control the outbreak—including the use of personal protective equipment, which became life-saving.
First Rousseeuw Prize Awarded for Work on Causal Inference
The King Baudouin Foundation has awarded the prize, worth $1 million, to James Robins, Miguel Hernán, Thomas Richardson, Andrea Rotnitzky, and Eric Tchetgen for their pioneering work on causal inference with applications in medicine and public health.
People News for August 2022
Read about what ASA members have been up to recently.
ASA GivesBack: Stories from the Fields
The six GivesBack members recently held a panel discussion in which they talked about ways their jobs are engaged in giving back to public health, society, and drug development.
Johns Hopkins Student Awarded ASA/AAAS Mass Media Fellowship
As the ASA’s 2022 AAAS Mass Media and Science and Engineering Fellow, Jayati Sharma will spend the summer sharpening her ability to ask questions as a science journalist with The Wichita Eagle and Kansas.com.
Significance Highlights: David Cox Passing, COVID-19 Data Lead April Issue
In a special 12-page collection of articles in this issue, friends and colleagues remember Sir David in their own way, while also reflecting on his immense contributions to statistics. Additionally, a selection of pieces is devoted to COVID data, lockdowns, modeling, and student learning.
Briana Joy Stephenson
Briana Joy Stephenson’s older brother unknowingly motivated her, as she challenged herself to master everything he learned so she would be competitive during their family Jeopardy games. This competitive spirit transcended to school, where she excelled in the classroom and eventually received the Top Flight Senior award at her tech magnet high school and a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Stephenson reflects on her circuitous yet intentional professional journey and is most proud of the influence she has had on the young women who follow her and have the confidence and encouragement to pursue the road less traveled.
Sacks Award Winners to Speak During JSM Invited Session
The National Institute of Statistical Sciences Jerome Sacks Award for Outstanding Cross-Disciplinary Research recognizes sustained, high-quality, cross-disciplinary research involving the statistical and data sciences. This year’s recipients will speak as a panel at JSM 2022 in August.
The Demand for Literacy Training on Quantitative Public Health Data
The global pandemic increased the public’s demand for information. Almost daily, media and policymakers present numbers on testing, deaths, hospitalization rates, and vaccine distribution. This information often includes data visualizations and tables viewers must interpret to better understand the pandemic’s scope and its impact on local communities and countries worldwide. As a result, there is a need for a new vocabulary around public health and data literacy.