Leadership

As we progress into the 2024-2025 academic year, I want to take a moment to welcome you all once again to the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics (DBEI). Whether you are a returning member of our community or joining us anew, I am excited to share the strategic vision guiding our department forward and reflect on the momentum that we have already built together.

At the DBEI, we are leading the way in addressing some of the most pressing challenges in population health. This year, we are sharpening our focus on the key scientific themes that position us as pioneers in the health data sciences:

Developing Learning Health Systems to Improve Population Health: We leverage diverse data sources—clinical trials, health records, biobanks—to generate insights to transform public health and clinical practice. Our work in this area involves the development of novel analytic methods for integrative learning, causal inference, and tools for implementation science to improve health systems and interventions.

Advancing Health Equity: We are committed to advancing health equity through a range of approaches, including improving diversity and accessibility in clinical trials; developing novel analytical methods to improve the validity and fairness of research for underserved populations; and addressing algorithmic fairness in machine learning and other prediction modeling algorithms.

Unlocking Knowledge from Complex Data: Recent advancements in biomedical and health sciences have introduced new data sources, including multi-platform omics, imaging, healthcare, environmental, and wearable device data. These complex, high-dimensional datasets pose challenges for collection, management, and analysis. We are advancing novel analytic methods to leverage this wealth of data for the benefit of precision medicine and public health.

As a department, we understand that innovation doesn’t occur in isolation. To reach our strategic goals in each of these areas, we remain committed to reinvesting in our people—recruiting and retaining faculty and staff expertise and educating the next generation of data scientists—and cultivating strategic partnerships at Penn and beyond. Together, we will continue to drive innovation and improve health outcomes locally, nationally, and globally.