Home

Program Description

Directors & Preceptors

Fellows

Events

Return to Biostatistics

CO-DIRECTORS

Brent Coull, PhD; (Professor of Biostatistics and Professor of Environmental Health at HSPH) is the Principal Investigator (PI) and Program Director of the training program. Dr. Coull has served as PI for this training grant since 2003. Since 2005, we have run the program by an executive committee comprising of the three or four core faculty who devote all of their research effort to quantitative methods in the environmental health sciences. Drs. Coull, Dominici, and Lin comprise the Executive Committee, with Dr. Coull serving as Director and Drs. Dominici and Lin serving as Co-directors. This Executive Committee meets regularly, discussing all administrative and academic management issues related to the program.

In addition to his current experience in this role, Dr. Coull has 15 years experience in a wide range of environmental health research, including work on assessing the neuro-developmental effects of methylmercury exposure in children and work on the development and application of statistical methods for the assessment of the health effects of air pollution. Dr. Coull is currently the Principal Investigator of the Environmental Statistics and Bioinformatics Core of the NIEHS Center for Environmental Health and the Biostatistics Core of the Harvard-EPA Clean Air Center (Overall PI: Koutrakis). He is also currently Principal Investigator of Project 6 of the Harvard Superfund Research Program, entitled "Optimizing Sampling and Statistical Analysis for Hazardous Waste Site Assessment", and of a grant from the Health Effects Institute (HEI) for the development of new statistical methodology for assessing the health effects of complex mixtures. He has served as PI or co-investigator on several NIEHS-funded R01's. His primary research interests focus on integrative modeling of exposure data collected at multiple spatial and temporal scales, measurement error issues associated with the use of outputs from such models in risk assessments, structural equations and functional data models in environmental applications. Dr. Coull has served as a panelist on multiple EPA advisory committees and currently serves as a member of the external advisory committees of the EPA Clean Air Centers at the University of Washington, Michigan State University, and Emory University.

Francesca Dominici, PhD; (Professor of Biostatistics and Associate Dean of Information Technology at the Harvard School of Public Health) serves as Program Co-director. Dr. Dominici works at the interface of biostatistics, environmental health and epidemiology. Her work on the effects of airborne particulate matter and ozone on human morbidity and mortality has brought greater acceptance of Bayesian methods in the environmental sciences, where she confronted problems of measurement error, meta-analysis, and spatial and time-series analyses. From a public health standpoint, the resulting analyses and Dr. Dominici's involvement with the US EPA heavily influenced the current air quality regulations. She has served on National Academy of Science panels on important public health topics such as the health effects associated with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, long-term health consequences of exposure to burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, secondhand smoke exposure and acute coronary events, among others. She also served on the Clean Air Advisory board of the US EPA.

Prior to coming to Harvard in 2009, Dr. Dominici was the Co-director of the training program in environmental biostatistics in the Department of Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University and the PI of the Hopkins EPA Particulate Matter Center. As Associate Dean of IT at HSPH, Dr. Dominici serves as a critical link between this training program and high-performance research computing resources at both the school (HSPH) and university level.

Xihong Lin, PhD; (Professor of Biostatistics at HSPH) also serves as Program Co-director. She is an integral part of the Environmental Statistics Training Program in that she heads our effort on statistical 'omics research in the environmental health sciences. She is the co-ordinating Director of the HSPH Program in Quantitative Genomics (PQG), a school-wide interdisciplinary program established in response to an increasing quantitative need for handling massive genetic, epigenetic, and other 'omic data at HSPH and the broader Longwood medical area, which also includes the Harvard Medical School and several Boston-area hospitals. She is a leading expert in the theory and methods for correlated and high-dimensional data and statistical genetics and genomics. As evidence of her prominence in these fields, she received a prestigious MERIT (Method to Extend Research in Time) Award from the National Cancer Institute and is also PI of the NCI-funded Program Project Grant (P01) "Statistical Informatics in Cancer Research". She also has strong interdisciplinary ties with the Department of Environmental Health here at the school, serving as the PI of the Biostatistics Core of the Harvard Superfund Research Program and as co-investigator of multiple environmentally-focused, NIEHS-funded R01's.

PRIMARY PRECEPTORS

Christopher Barr, PhD; Assistant Professor, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health.

Tianxi Cai, PhD; Professor, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health.

Paul Catalano, ScD; Senior Lecturer on Biostatistics, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health.

Sebastien Haneuse, PhD; Assistant Professor, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health.

Peter Kraft, PhD; Associate Professor, Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health.

Nan Laird, PhD; Professor, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health.

Christoph Lange, PhD; Department of Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health (Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School).

James Robins, PhD; Professor, Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health.

Donna Spiegelman, ScD; Professor, Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health.

Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen, PhD; Associate Professor, Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health.

Tyler VanderWeele, PhD; Associate Professor, Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health.

Paige Williams, PhD; Senior Lecturer on Biostatistics, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health.

SECONDARY PRECEPTORS

David Bellinger, PhD; Professor, Department of Environmental Health, Harvard School of Public Health / Department of Neurology, Children's Hospital Boston / Harvard Medical School.

David Christiani, PhD; Professor, Departments of Environmental Health and Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health (Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School / Director, Harvard Education and Research Center for Occupational Safety and Health / Physician, Massachusetts General Hospital).

Douglas Dockery, ScD; Professor, Departments of Environmental Health and Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health / Chair, Department of Environmental Health (Director, Harvard-NIEHS Center for Environmental Health / Associate Professor of Medicine (Epidemiology), Channing Laboratory, Harvard Medical School).

John Evans, ScD; Senior Lecturer, Department of Environmental Health, Harvard School of Public Health.

John J. Godleski, MD; Associate Professor, Department of Environmental Health, Harvard School of Public Health (Associate Professor of Pathology, Harvard Medical School).

Diane Gold, MD, MPH; Associate Professor, Department of Environmental Health, Harvard School of Public Health (Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School).

Russ Hauser, MD, ScD; Professor, Departments of Environmental Health and Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health (Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology, Harvard Medical School.

Susan Korrick, MD, MPH; Assistant Professor, Department of Environmental Health, Harvard School of Public Health (Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School).

Petros Koutrakis, PhD; Professor, Department of Environmental Health, Harvard School of Public Health.

Nancy Krieger, PhD; Professor, Department of Society, Human Development, and Health, Harvard School of Public Health (Co-Director, Interdisciplinary Concentration on Women, Gender and Health, Harvard School of Public Health / Chair, Spirit of 1848 Caucus, American Public Health Association).

Francine Laden, ScD; Associate Professor, Departments of Environmental Health and Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health (Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School).

Murray Mittleman, MDCM, DrPH, MPH; Associate Professor, Department of Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health (Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School /Director of the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Research Unit and Associate Director of the Harvard Catalyst (CTSC) Biostatistics Consulting program, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center).

Joel Schwartz, PhD; Professor, Departments of Environmental Health and Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health (Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School).

James Shine, PhD; Senior Lecturer, Department of Environmental Health, Harvard School of Public Health.

John Spengler, PhD; Professor, Department of Environmental Health, Harvard School of Public Health.