The OSU biostatistical activity is organized around two OSU entities. The first of these is the OSU Biostatistics Program, a Division of the College of Public Health.
The Biostatistics Division in the College of Public Health was founded in 2010 to include both classroom instruction and joint research with faculty members in the Life Sciences. The PhD program in Biostatistics, which had been run by the Statistics Department, was then jointly administered by the Statistics Department and the OSU School of Public Health.
The Department of Statistics and the Biostatistics Division hosted an NSF-sponsored Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Program during Summer 2001. REU programs give undergraduates the chance to perform faculty-guided research and collaborative research. A second REU was offered in 2002, this time broadened from the students interested in Biostatistics research to any field of Applied Statistics. In total, the REU programs attracted ten undergraduates in 2001, and eight in 2002.
A second component of the OSU Biostatistical activity was conducted by members of the Mathematical Biosciences Institute (MBI) .
From its opening in 2002, and throughout its operation, the MBI hosted workshops centered on its thematic semesters which included subjects such as mathematical neuroscience (2002-2003), cellular processes (2003-2004), cancer and its environment, and analysis of complex data in biological systems, and uncertainty in ecological analysis (2006). The MBI operated a vibrant program for postdoctoral scholars, with between 8 and 15 postdocs in residence each year. The MBI maintains a digital archive of talks and educational programs given at the institute during its operation.
The MBI also facilitated numerous education and outreach programs, including a long-running “distributed” REU program in which undergraduate students started and ended their summer research experience at MBI while working at an institute partner university for the bulk of the summer. As another example, the popular Workshop for Young Researchers in Mathematical Biology was held annually to facilitate connections among early-career researchers.
Other workshops included “Gene Expression Data Analysis” (2004), “MicroRNA in Development and Cancer” (2007), “Statistical System Biology” (2009), and “Family-based Genomic Studies” (2018) all of which were co-organized by Shili Lin, and “Uncertainty in Ecological Analysis” (2006) organized by Noel Cressie.
An MBI Summer Program brought high school teachers to campus to study and collaborate on research projects with Ohio State faculty and postdoctoral researchers who are part of the MBI. This program offered mathematics and science teachers the chance to increase their hands-on experience of the interconnections between mathematical modeling and biological research.
After 20 years of sustained NSF funding, MBI closed in summer 2021. As a celebration of the legacy of mathematical biology and the MBI at OSU, Ohio State hosted the 50th anniversary meeting of the Society of Mathematical Biology in July 2023. Laura Kubatko, finishing her duties as MBI co-director, served as the meeting organizer and chair.
Personnel Changes
A number of researcher changes gave the MBI and Biostatistical units additional flexibility in the choice of projects that these groups worked on. The following describes a sampling of these administrative modifications. In 2010, H.N. Nagaraja resigned from the Department of Statistics to accept a newly-created position as Chair of the Division of Biostatistics in the College of Public Health at OSU, which he held until retiring in 2015. Shili Lin was appointed Professor in the Division of Biostatistics 2009-2014.
At the MBI, Avner Friedman (Mathematics) was the first Director, with Dennis Pearl (Statistics) and Andrej Rotter (Pharmacology) as the two Associate Directors. When Friedman stepped down, Marty Golubitsky was hired to lead the institute and served as director from 2008-2016. After Greg Rempala’s term as interim director, Kate Calder (Statistics) and Janet Best (Mathematics) were appointed co-directors of the MBI in January 2018, and Laura Kubatko joined Janet Best as a co-director in July 2019 when Calder left the university. Sebastian Kurtek (Statistics) became Associate Director in 2018-2020. Other statistics faculty have acted as mentors to postdocs over the years, including Santner, Shen, Verducci, Kubatko, Calder. Members of the Local Scientific Advisory Committee included Shili Lin (2005-2018).