2024 Education News
Led by a newly restructured Educational Leadership Team which includes all degree program directors and departmental leadership, our department has continued the growth and expansion of its educational mission in all its dimensions, including a very dynamic process of curricular refinement and revisions. Our curriculum committee has continued to improve its curriculum in response to both industry and student feedback and has approved the creation of new courses such as those utilizing new computing tools such as Python.
The Public Health Data Science (PHDS) Track for the MS in Biostatistics program has continued to be the most popular track and graduated its second cohort in Spring 2024 – as part of a large graduating class of 122 students. These graduates have now successfully secured employment in the industry or are continuing their studies across 9 doctoral programs, including our own Biostatistics Department. Our MPH program continues to be a very well regarded and robust program, with 21 students graduating in Spring 2024, and have made a very successful transition to employment or further studies. You can see some of the paths our graduates are pursuing as of our 2024 exit survey in the 2024 Student Data page.
Our PhD program admitted one if its largest incoming cohorts, 7 students, in recognition of the need to expand our program to fit our faculty size and profile, and also as a result of securing a new NIH funded T32 training program, led by Drs. Yuanjia Wang and Todd Ogden.
We continue to motivate and immerse undergraduate students from across the country in biostatistics and data science with our NIH funded pipeline programs: SIBDS@Columbia and BEST summer programs. In 2024, we hosted 15 and 14 students respectively for these synergistic programs, engaging students in the fundamentals and research of biostatistics and providing opportunities for hands-on biomedical analysis. The programs offer students the chance to work closely with faculty mentors on research projects, and to present their results to their fellow students and the wider school in a poster session. In September 2024, our department co-hosted (along with the Columbia Department of Statistics), STATFEST 2024, an annual event that is organized by American Statistical Association Committee on Minorities, with Dr. Tian Zheng (Chair of Columbia Statistics) and I serving as Co-Chairs of the Local Organizing Committee, with Erin Elliott and Paul McCullough providing critical support. This event attracted a very large number of undergraduates from across the country, along with several exhibitors, keynote speakers and panelists.
On the international front, our NIH-funded data science training program, Advancing Public Health Research in Eastern Africa through Data Science Training (APHREA-DST), continues to thrive. This training program is part of NIH’s Data Science Initiative for Africa (DS-I Africa), and is conducted in partnership with University of Nairobi (Kenya) and Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia) to establish a new MS degree in Public Health Data Science - now fully established - and also train faculty and early career researchers in both countries. In addition to the ongoing short-term activities to train faculty and early career researchers, the first cohort of trainees from University of Nairobi (Kenya) have now graduated as of September 2024, a landmark achievement!