We are extremely pleased to announce that Department alumna Dr. Andrea Foulkes, ScD ’00, has been named the incoming Director of the Biostatistics Center at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) with a faculty appointment in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
After receiving her doctorate in 2000 at HSPH under the direction of Dr. Victor DeGruttola, Dr. Foulkes stayed as a postdoctoral research fellow to continue her work in HIV genetics. She served on the faculty in the Five Colleges of Western Massachusetts for the past 15 years prior to returning to Harvard/MGH this past September. Dr. Foulkes’ research includes methods for high-dimensional molecular and cellular data and measures of disease progression with applications in inflammatory disease, cardio-metabolic disease and HIV/AIDS. In addition to her methods research in biostatistics, she authored the graduate level textbook “Applied Statistical Genetics with R” in 2009 for Springer’s UseR! Series, and has since developed extensive open-source and extensible education resources in statistical genetics.
The MGH Biostatistics Center is home to more than 30 faculty and staff with collaborations across 15 divisions at MGH. The center was founded in 1985 by Dr. David Schoenfeld, and has been led by Dr. Dianne Finkelstein for the past 10 years. Dr. Foulkes will continue the long tradition of leading impactful trans-disciplinary collaborations with clinical investigators while expanding in strategic areas of “big data” science including precision medicine applications. She also looks forward to continuing a robust partnership with the Department of Biostatistics at HSPH.
