Message from the Chair

Welcome to the Department of Biostatistics, an intellectually vibrant and interpersonally collegial department that's conducive to learning and discovery. We are grateful for your interest.

One thing you will see in our Department is a rich landscape of ideas being created by our faculty, students, and postdoctoral fellows. A hallmark for us is that our quantitative discoveries are driven by the determination to advance health science. Our targets of study span cells-to-whole-person functioning and individuals-to-society; environmental implications for health; neonatal health through older adult well-being; the Baltimore community to the globe; technologies to assess the genome, image the brain, and track health behaviors on a second-to-second basis; and a wide variety of diseases and targets of health promotion.

Quantitative interests in our community span foundations of statistics through data science in action. In between, they include statistical modeling driven by hypotheses, description, and prediction; population and causal inference; signal detection and dimension reduction; Bayesian analysis and forecasting; study design; statistical learning; and robust data analyses. 

The passion with which our community strives to increase biomedical knowledge—and ultimately the public’s health—through our statistical and data science expertise is one of two qualities that makes our department so special in the constellation of outstanding statistics, biostatistics, and data science departments around the country.

Anchored by our activities on site in Baltimore, we have also learned new flexibilities of format, hosting events, working meetings, and classroom sessions that can include people from around the globe all at once. 

The second quality that distinguishes our Department is our supportive, close-knit community. Amid the many changes of recent times, this is an anchor remaining in place. Our community makes our Department a wonderful setting in which to study, launch a career, and to spend a career. Our Department is the type of environment where office dropping-by, spontaneous jaunts to get coffee together, daily lunch hanging out, and ping pong in our Genome café, sparks wild creativity. It is the sort of environment where we can take risks, because our friends will have our backs if success does not always follow, and where we love living and working together.

Thank you for your visit to our website and your interest in our energetic department; and a special heartfelt thanks to our many friends who have generously given their support! Without it, we could not recruit our outstanding faculty, students, or staff.

I hope I will have the pleasure of welcoming many of you to Baltimore soon.

—Elizabeth Stuart, PhD, Frank Hurley and Catharine Dorrier Professor and Chair, Department of Biostatistics
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health