Pipelines into Biostatistics Annual Symposium

On July 19-21, the six-week Summer Program in Biostatistics & Computational Biology culminated with an extremely successful three days of workshops, symposium, meetings, reunions, evaluation and celebration. All Summer Program activities were designed to increase diversity in the field of Biostatistics by promoting underrepresented minority students.

This year, Betty Johnson, Assistant Dean for Faculty and Staff Diversity, Development and Leadership at the Chan School of Public Health kicked off the symposium with a fabulous and inspiring welcome address. The keynote speaker at the symposium was Biostats Department alumna Knashawn H. Morales, ScD ’01, now Associate Professor of Biostatistics in the Departments of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania. There were many networking opportunities and a panel discussion with alumni from previous summer programs representing the years 1997-2016.

The summer program also hosted five visiting faculty from diverse minority serving colleges and universities to acquaint them with our department so that they can encourage their students to consider Biostatistics at Harvard.

These kinds of events require an enormous amount of work and participation from faculty, students and staff. The Summer Program would like to thank the following people:

  • Marcello Pagano: Program Director
  • Jai Vartikar & Megan Scott: Program Coordinators
  • Rafa Irizarry, JP Onnela, John Quackenbush, Sherri Rose, Cory Zigler: Faculty who mentored summer student research projects.
  • Brent Coull & Victor De Gruttola: Faculty who mentored post-baccalaureate intern research projects
  • Sarah Anoke, Shirley Liao, Heather Mattie: Instructors for Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Computing to the summer students
  • Savannah Bergquist, Sheila Gaynor, Chanmin Kim, John Platig, Kamrine Poels, Patrick Staples: Graduate students and post-docs who mentored the summer students’ research
  • Sarah Anoke, Brent Coull, Heather Mattie, Xiao-Li Meng, Marcello Pagano, John Quackenbush, Paige Williams, David Wypij: Faculty, deans, and post-docs who presented to our Visiting Faculty Workshop
  • Martin Aryee, Rebecca Betensky, Julie Buring, Brent Coull, Melody Goodman, Bethany Hedt-Gauthier, Curtis Huttenhower, Betty Johnson, Xihong Lin, Marcello Pagano, Jerald Schindler, Laura Forsberg White: Faculty who gave seminars and met with the summer students
  • Sarah Anoke, Kaitlin Cook, Shirley Liao, Emily Slade, Sam Tracy, Jaffer Zaid: Graduate students and postdocs who met with our Visiting Faculty
  • Minerva Cordero, Melody Goodman, William Jenkins, DeJuran Richardson: External Advisory Board
  • Nicole Levesque & Amanda King: Staff who gave the Writing & Public Speaking Workshops
  • Shaina Andelman & Amanda King: Staff took photos and helped with the posters and programs
  • Valerie Coffee, Amanda King, Susan Luvisi: Staff who helped with much coordination
  • Rachel Boschetto, Marc Brissette, Kathleen Hong: Staff who helped with financial oversight