There are currently 34 PhD level statisticians and computer scientists with appointments (full or partial) in the Department, most having joint or affiliate appointments with one or more of the Departments of Statistics, of Computer Sciences, or of Population Health Sciences. During the Calendar Year 2016, faculty members in BMI received over $14M (total costs) as principal investigators on research and training projects from NIH, NSF, and industry in areas that include biostatistics applied to pre-clinical, clinical and population health research; biomedical and clinical informatics; statistical genetics and genomics; and medical imaging.
The Department is home to an innovative Center for Predictive Computational Phenotyping, funded under the NIH “Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Program”, which provides a locus for dynamic interdisciplinary methodology work across the broad waterfront of biomedical data science, including imaging, genomics, and clinical research informatics. Organized around a set of four methodological labs and six more applied projects, the Center has generated enormous interest on campus, synergies across areas of quantitative methodological research (e.g., (bio)statistics, computer science and informatics, and electrical and computer engineering), and training opportunities for students, including, now, a BD2K-funded T32 pre-doctoral training program in Bio-Data Science.
In addition, as part of its scholarly mission, the Department also serves as a resource for investigators in the basic, clinical, and population health sciences. Department faculty and staff collaborate in the design, conduct, and analyses of laboratory, clinical, epidemiologic, health services, genetic, and imaging studies with scientists and clinicians from departments and centers across the UW campus and the state. These include the NIH CTSA-funded Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, the NCI-funded UW Carbone (Comprehensive) Cancer Center, the Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation, and the UW Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.
The Department maintains strong ties to the world-class Departments of Statistics, of Computer Sciences, and of Population Health Sciences at UW-Madison, through which most of its graduate students are trained. In addition, the Department now has its own active graduate program in Biomedical Data Science, and will be admitting its first cohort of PhD students in Fall 2018. The program requires students to obtain training in all three of statistics, computation, and an area of biology or biomedicine, and builds on the Department’s unique strengths across the statistical and the computational methodological domains.
Finally, the Department has a full array of program staff along with 18 Master’s level biostatisticians who work closely both with the Department faculty and their key collaborators.