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STUDENT HANDBOOK 1. WELCOME Welcome to the Department of
Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health. Our Department was the first academic
department of statistics in the United States, founded in 1918. Its major goal,
achieved through education and research, is to enhance and promote effective
statistical reasoning and its application in health research and ultimately, to
advance the public's health. All faculty and students are required to adhere to the School of Public
Health's
academic ethics code. 2. MISSION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF BIOSTATISTICS AND SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH The Department has as its mission: Biostatistics comprises the reasoning and methods for using data as evidence
to address public health and biomedical questions. It is an approach and a set
of tools for designing studies and for quantifying the resulting evidence, for
quantifying what we believe, and for making decisions. FIGURE 1 goes here. Research on
foundations has as its goal the development of better strategies, or ways of
reasoning, for empirical research. For example, past chair William
Cochran demonstrated how observational studies can be used to draw
inferences about the causal effect of a treatment on a health outcome. Jerry
Cornfield showed how case control studies can be used to draw valid
inferences about parameters in prospective models. Today, Richard
Royall
and others are leading a transition in statistical reasoning from decision
methods (p-values, tests of hypotheses) toward likelihood methods, which
quantify scientific evidence. Research on statistical methodology has as its goal the
creation of new tools for drawing inferences from data. To illustrate, Ron
Brookmeyer and Mitch
Gail developed the methodology used to monitor and project the size
of the US AIDS epidemic; Kung-Yee
Liang, Mei-Cheng
Wang, and Scott
Zeger developed methods for regression analysis with correlated responses.
Dan
Scharfstein and colleagues have developed graphical techniques for assessing
the possible impact of missing data in clinical trials and observational
studies. Kung-Yee Liang, Karl
Broman, and Giovanni
Parmigiani are developing new techniques to find disease genes. Biostatistics also includes research on important
substantive questions. For example, Francesca
Dominici and colleagues have used multiple national databases to
determine the effects of air pollution on mortality across the 90 largest
American cities. Marie
Diener-West, Jim
Tonascia, Steve
Piantadosi, and others have led or collaborated in clinical trials of new
therapeutic treatments. Throughout its history and today, Hopkins Biostatistics has
embraced a broad definition of our discipline, including foundations,
methodology, and applications. The faculty's commitment to this inclusive
perspective and the support of the School's administration and faculty are two
of the intangible yet critical components of the Department's current and future
success. |