Inside Stanford Medicine - June 25, 2012
The National Institutes of Health has awarded Stanford a $2.1 million grant to expand its PhD training program in the field of biostatistics for personalized medicine.
Jointly administered by the Department of Statistics and the medical school’s Department of Health Research and Policy, this program will address the growing shortage of biostatisticians proficient in skills for analyzing the vast amounts of health data being generated by sequencers, microarrays and electronic medical records.
Funds for the training program will be awarded over five years, allowing the number of PhD candidates in the Statistics Department to grow from 12 to 16 students.
“The promise of personalized medicine, where treatments are tailored to an individual’s unique genetic makeup and health history, can only be realized if we can put the best minds to work on these large and complex data-analytic problems,” said Robert Tibshirani, PhD, professor of health research and policy and of statistics, who will lead the training program.
Tibshirani said the expanded PhD program will include interdisciplinary collaborations with faculty experts in genomics, bioinformatics, biostatistics, health research and medicine. In addition, each of the PhD candidates will spend time working within a medical school laboratory as an applied biostatistician on a clinical research team.
Co-directors on the grant are Richard Olshen, PhD, and Chiara Sabatti, PhD, professor and associate professor, respectively, of health research and policy and of statistics.
Interested candidates should apply through the Department of Statistics by Dec. 11.
