“Statistics has been my career and an important part of my life,” says Luisa Fernholz, director of the Fernholz Foundation, which recently made a $300,000 contribution to the Department of Biostatistics to support faculty salaries.
Fernholz holds a PhD in statistics from Rutgers and is professor emerita of statistics at Temple University, where she taught from 1987 to 2004. “The use of statistics and statistical methods has increased dramatically in the last several decades, with the massive increase in data as well as the greater processing power of computers and the development of specialized software,” she says. “Having all these data and the tools to analyze them has made statistics a very important field.” Biostatistics is a highly interdisciplinary field, she notes. Molecular biology, epidemiology, genetics, and drug development, among other disciplines, all use biostatistics. “As a dynamic discipline, biostatistics needs new methodologies to deal with the increasing quantities of data. Training statisticians to develop new methods to analyze data is indeed a vital contribution to the School and to the society,” says Fernholz. “Biostatistics is crucial, and I think it’s important to help this field.”
Fernholz also noticed the reduction in federal government funding for research and decided that she had to act. “I think that people have to step in and fill in the gaps in funding that the government does not cover,” she says. “That is what we’re trying to do with this gift.”
At the suggestion of John McGoldrick, AB ’63, LLB ’66, a friend from Princeton who has endowed the John L. McGoldrick Fellowship in Biostatistics in AIDS Research at the Harvard Chan School, Fernholz met with several Harvard Chan faculty members in the Department of Biostatistics. She was highly impressed, and she is also happy that the Department includes several women faculty, as she has worked to promote the advancement of women in the sciences.
“The more I read and learned about the Department,” says Fernholz, “the more I felt that this was the right place to contribute. I think they are doing an excellent job, and I am very happy with this decision.”