A major award for a University of Colorado Cancer Center member underscores the vital importance of data science in cancer research.
Debashis Ghosh, PhD, a professor in the Colorado School of Public Health’s Department of Biostatistics and Informatics, recently received the Outstanding Impact Award and Lectureship from the Western North American Region of the International Biometric Society (WNAR of the INS).
The annual award, established in 2021, recognizes “research in development and application of statistical, mathematical, and data science theory and methods in the biomedical and environmental sciences.” The WNAR Award Committee praised Ghosh’s “highly impactful research contributions to the fields of biometrics and science at large.”
“I’m really humbled and honored to have won this award,” Ghosh says. “It’s tremendously huge for me.”
The honor also recognizes Ghosh’s various professional leadership roles across a career spanning more than 25 years, including serving as Biostatistics and Informatics department chair for more than a decade before stepping down in 2024. David Conti, PhD, recruited from the University of Southern California, will succeed Ghosh as chair in January.
Ghosh also has been a program chair for professional conferences, an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and a former chair of the Biostatistical Methods and Research Design study section at the National Institutes of Health.
Ghosh says stepping aside as chair allows him more time to devote to his research, which centers on concepts that may not be familiar to a non-specialist – things like causal modeling, multiple testing, recurrent event analysis, and kernel machines. The goal of much of his work is to improve our understanding of cancer.
“My research basically falls into two buckets,” he says. “One is looking at molecular omics types of data. The other one is looking at more patient-level, real-world data.”
In molecular biology, “omics” is a collective term for the analysis of large molecular data sets whose names end in -omics, including genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. Omics research has been used to help identify cancer-causing genes, develop targeted cancer therapies by analyzing mutated genes, and find new uses for existing drugs.
“There’s a database that gets used quite a bit in cancer research called Oncomine, and it basically came out of a collaboration in my first job at University of Michigan 25 years ago,” Ghosh says.
“This was back when people were doing first-generation genomics experiments. Our group was looking at prostate cancer, and as we were publishing our work, we saw that other groups were doing the same thing. Oncomine basically stemmed out of a very natural question, which was, can we take data from other labs and integrate it with the data we were generating at our own labs? The idea was that if other groups were doing experiments in a slightly different way but finding similar results, we could increase our power in making discoveries by pulling data from all these different groups.”
Since that early work decades ago, Ghosh has continued to explore “multi-omics,” the integration of multiple types of omics data to unlock cancer’s secrets.
“Because cancer is so complex, a lot of different aspects of biology matter simultaneously,” he says, “so you have to profile different levels of biology on the same patients to look at how these different factors interact with each other to drive a patient’s prognosis.”
As for his other research bucket – patient data – Ghosh is interested in studying the cancer patient experience, and particularly “the recruitment of patients to clinical trials who may or may not be representative of the broader population. They tend to be higher income or white. So a lot of my research interest has been developing methods to understand and bridge that disparity.”
Ghosh feels that the role of data science in cancer research “is so crucial and compelling, but with the machines getting so fast, the data is coming at a rate faster than there are people to analyze it. So one of the biggest contributions I can make as an educator is to prepare the next generation of researchers to be able to do that.”
He says that with much of academic medicine focused on principal investigators bringing in grants to do their own research, “I would describe my own contribution with my skill set as a force multiplier. I do get grants for my own research, but I feel like my most impactful role is in working on a team and bringing a quantitative perspective to the issues being studied.”
There’s also a personal element to his cancer work, Ghosh says.
“In my first year at Michigan, my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer,” he says. “That was super scary. We didn’t know what his future would be like. Fortunately, his cancer was caught at a very early stage, but he had a prostatectomy done and then had to deal with the effects of that surgery. I’ve had other family members and friends who have been affected by cancer in various ways. I’m not a clinician. I don’t see patients. But if I can lend my skills to make an impact in this space in some way, that feels very rewarding to me.”
Photo at top: Debashis Ghosh, PhD, receives the Outstanding Impact Award from the Western North American Region of the International Biometric Society at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Nashville in August 2025.