Biostatistics

BEST participants during a seminar lecture by Biostatistics Department Chair Dr. Roger Vaughan.

Biostatistics doctoral student Emma Benn laughs when asked how she landed in the field, “I know that when I was a kid, I never said I wanted to be a biostatistician when I grew up.”

Benn’s lack of familiarity with Biostatistics – as a field, much less a vocation – reflects a deeper issue within public health where limited minority representation in the field has resulted in lower awareness of public health as a career choice among younger generations.

In 2008, Benn and Gary Yu, another doctoral student in the department, noticed the lack of diversity among doctoral and master’s Biostatistics students and decided to do something about it. They approached Dr. Bruce Levin, the department chair at the time, and asked to start a summer program that would serve as a boot camp for educating minority students about public health as a field and Biostatistics, in particular, as a career.

“Dr. Levin was all for it,” recounts Benn. “That first summer we built this program from scratch and piloted it with City College students. And it was a success.”

And so The Biostatistics Enrichment Summer Training (BEST) Diversity Program was born.

From Pilot to Program

BEST was such a success that first year that Dr. Melissa Begg, ScD, professor of clinical Biostatistics, thought it would be worth trying to get federal funding for it. A successful application to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute netted the program five years of funding allowing BEST to recruit students nationwide from underserved groups.

This year, BEST celebrates its fourth year.  The pilot project has turned into an 8-week program exposing students to biostatistics and its applications in public health. Twelve undergraduate students from across the country have enrolled in the intensive program excited by the opportunities to learn more about the discipline and to get hands-on research experience. Each student is connected to a Columbia University faculty mentor who provides invaluable guidance on the students’ research project.

Dr. Begg, who was recently appointed Vice Dean for Education at the Mailman School, notes that, “The mission of the BEST program is better health through diversity. But diversity with respect to what? With respect to the researchers and scientists conducting the research, the students learning about it, the questions being addressed, and the participants being studied.”

“Good research is all about coming up with good questions. To generate good questions, you need to incorporate many perspectives. In order to ensure the relevance of research efforts to diverse populations and cultures, it is essential that investigative teams are diverse in membership – to inform the research agenda, especially the questions and populations to be studied.”

BEST participant José Colón.

"Anything Can Happen"

Benn is proud of what the program has accomplished. “At this point, we are seeing students who did our program a summer or two ago now getting accepted either here or at other schools of public health. We’re seeing so many students who wouldn’t have considered graduate school first as an option, but then on top of that, thinking about public health and Biostatistics.”

José Colón, from Hanover College in Indiana and a potential pre-med student, sums up his attraction to Biostatistics, “I really like math and have a background in that. I also like science and biology, so I really like the combination of biology and statistics in this program. You never know if that’s what I’ll end up doing in the future. But at this point anything can happen.”

See video interview with Emma Benn about how she became interested in Biostatistics.

June 30, 2011