About the Department
Department of Biostatistics at NYU GPH is engaged in three inter-related activities that aim to improve Public Health through rigorous research and that educate future practitioners, leaders and researchers. We strive for excellence in:
- innovative and groundbreaking methodological research that is relevant to critical Public Health research
- collaborative research in pressing and important Public Health issues;
- education and training of students from diverse backgrounds in cutting edge statistical methods for design and analysis of studies used in Public Health research, as well as theoretical foundations that will serve as the basis for future innovations.
We are experiencing major events in Public Health and Biostatistics has many critical contributions to make. We welcome you to our department and invite you to explore all of our facets in these webpages.
Prominent Links
Departmental Annual Report
Our Efforts in Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI)
Our faculty were recently featured in the Amstat News cover story recognizing academic departments for JEDI efforts.
Student Life
Click here to view photos from our graduation reception for the class of 2023!
Contact Us
- Email: gph.bsadmin@nyu.edu
- Twitter: @NYUGPHBiostats
- For her outstanding work as a statistician with NYU's Critical Race Digital Studies program, our department's Dr. Stephanie Cook has been recognized by Amstat News as the winner of the 2023 Data for Good Challenge under the category of Human Rights.
- From November 15th through 18th, 2023, our program administrator Vardia Duterville represented our department at the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minoritized Scientists (ABRCMS) in Phoenix, Arizona to recruit for our MS and MPH degrees and the PQAR Summer program.
- One of our first-year PhD students, Xiaoting Chen, has had a first-author paper from her time in our MS program, "Area-based determinants of outreach vaccination for reaching vulnerable populations: A cross-sectional study in Pakistan", published in PLOS Global Public Health.
- On September 14th and 15th, 2023, the GPH Center for Health Data Science, directed by our department's Dr. Rumi Chunara, hosted a two-day event, "Human and Planetary Health Roundtable & Symposium: Foregrounding Local Research and Data".
- This Fall, we are excited to welcome Dr. Alex Dahlen as a new clinical associate professor for our department. Among his responsibilities, Dr. Dahlen will be responsible for leading and further developing our Biostatistics Consulting Lab.
- We are excited to share that many of our 2023 MS and MPH graduates have entered into exciting, data-driven roles such as statistical programmer for AbbVie, Inc., Statistician I at LLX Solutions, LLC, and RWS Analyst at IQVIA. In addition, several have recently been accepted to PhD programs - we congratulate them, and you can find many of these PhD and job placements on our Where Your Degree Can Take You page. Below are several of these recent PhD acceptances:
- PhD Candidate in Biostatistics, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
- PhD Candidate in Epidemiology, University of Rochester
- PhD Candidate in Biostatistics, NYU School of Global Public Health
- PhD Candidate in Biostatistics, Boston University
- PhD Candidate in Biostatistics, NYU School of Global Public Health
- PhD Candidate in Biostatistics, University of Illinois at Chicago, School of Public Health
- PhD Candidate in Quantitative Biomedical Sciences, Dartmouth College
- PhD Candidate in Statistics, Texas A&M University
- We would like to highlight three major accomplishments Dr. Stephanie Cook has achieved this Summer:
- She has been awarded her first R01 grant, titled "A Strengths-Based, Intersectional Approach to Suicide Prevention Among Black LGBT Youth", from the National Institutes of Mental Health.
- The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute has awarded her an NIH LRP Award, titled "Identifying physiological and behavioral mechanisms linking discrimination and subclinical cardiovascular disease among racially diverse young sexual minority men".
- She has been selected as a Faculty Fellow-in-Residence at NYU's newly constructed John A. Paulson Center.
- This past June, our department's Dr. Yang Feng was promoted to full professor of Biostatistics. Yang makes substantial contributions to the School and the Department through his research, teaching, mentoring of masters and PhD students, leadership of our PhD concentration, and generous participation in the functioning of the department.
- Our department's Dr. Shu (Violet) Xu has been awarded a Mentored Research Scientist Development Award (K01) from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, for her project titled "Using Causal Machine Learning Methods to Inform Tobacco Regulatory Science".
- Congratulations to the Class of 2023! Our graduates have done incredible work throughout their time in our program, which we were thrilled to celebrate at our departmental graduation reception on May 16th (photos). This work culminated in their Masters' Theses, many of which you can find on our Biostatistics Student Theses page. In particular, we would like to congratulate graduates Yan Cao, Xiaoting Chen, Xin Chen, Zhihao Chen, Yuhan (Betty) Cui, Antoneta Karaj, Kexin Li, Marina Mautner Wizentier, Ching-Tsung (Deron) Tsai, and Yiyu Zhou for receiving our department's thesis recognition awards (the recognition categories for which can also be found on the Student Theses page).
- Dr. Yang Feng has been elected as a 2023 Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) Fellow. Dr. Feng received the award for "outstanding contributions to high-dimensional statistics, nonparametric statistics, social network analysis, and statistical machine learning; for statistical software development; and for dedicated service to the profession". The designation of IMS Fellow has been a significant honor for over 85 years. IMS Fellowship honors the outstanding research and professional contributions of its members, contributions that help keep IMS in a leading role in the field of statistics and probability.
(Archived news items)
Biostatistics Seminar Series
Thursday, December 7th, 12:30 - 1:30pm EST
"An approach to nonparametric inference on the causal dose response function", to be presented by Dr. Aaron Hudson of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center (RSVP)
Biostatistics Seminar Series
Thursday, February 1st, 11:00am - 12:00pm EST
Talk details TBA, to be presented by Dr. Razieh Nabi of the Emory University Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics
Biostatistics Seminar Series
Thursday, March 14th, 11:00am - 12:00pm EDT
Talk details TBA, to be presented by Dr. Jingyi (Jessica) Li of the UCLA Department of Statistics
Biostatistics Seminar Series
Thursday, April 11th, 12:30 - 1:30pm EDT
Talk details TBA, to be presented by Dr. Daniel Malinsky of the Columbia University Mailman University of Public Health, Department of Biostatistics
Check Out Our Past Seminars & Events
Christopher Park, MPH '19
"Critical and conceptual understanding of data is necessary for public health research. My biostatistics courses have helped me to develop statistical analytic skills that shape the way I think about data management and utilization in a way that’s fit for public health discoveries."
Ejiro Gbaje, MPH '19
"I am fascinated by the power of biostatistics; it uses mathematics to paint pictures of underlying conditions."
Yan Zhang, MPH '19
"The ability to extract health-related patterns from uncertainty is the undeniable beauty of biostatistics."