January is a month of renewal. As students and faculty start the spring semester, recent graduates are entering the work force, and we enter the new year, we want to look at some of the academic programs and opportunities that are propelling our students to advance public health. One of those is the biostatistics & informatics department.
As data science grows in popularity, and data grows in availability, the field of biostatistics is also expanding, with job and research opportunities, and almost limitless potential, the biostats department at ColoradoSPH is helping students stand apart.
Learn more about how our Center for Innovative Design and Analysis (CIDA) is preparing students for the workforce from day one.
Unlocking Health Insights: How Biostatistics Combines Mathematics & Medicine for a Healthier Future
The field of biostatistics is the perfect combination for those who want to be involved in the health space and are also passionate about, and good at, mathematics.
For Drs. Brandie Wagner, PhD, ’08, MS, and Katerina Kechris, PhD, MA, this dual interest drove them to first study biostatistics and then teach it, which they each have been doing for about 20 years at the ColoradoSPH Department of Biostatistics and Informatics.
As data science grows in popularity, and data grows in availability, the field of biostatistics is also expanding, with job and research opportunities, and almost limitless potential. Biostatistics uses statistical and computational methods to design studies and analyze health-related data.
Biostatisticians use quantitative techniques to impact the health of people and communities by working with experts in other fields, such as biologists, clinicians, and geneticists.
Not only are faculty utilizing data research, but they are also teaching students how to use data responsibly, said faculty member Dr. Debashis Ghosh, PhD, MS. For example, he said, artificial intelligence platforms that rely on open-source data, such as ChatGPT, have an inherent bias. Being aware of those biases and being aware of where data comes from is equally important.
Wagner, an associate professor, runs a six-week summer program for undergraduates from across the country who are in advanced math or statistics courses. The Colorado Summer Institute in Biostatistics (CoSIBS) has been running at CU Anschutz since 2006 and takes about 25 students each summer, with a focus on recruiting traditionally underrepresented students. The program provides an immersive training and research experience, as well as food, housing, seminars, and mentorship from faculty. The students work in groups with a faculty member to conduct applied statistical data projects.
“It’s a really good pathway program for students who don’t know about biostatistics,” Wagner said.
In the 2024 summer session, for example, students worked on analyzing hospital data to estimate whether community-acquired pneumonia in children is bacterial or viral. Because no gold-standard test currently exists for this, doctors often broadly prescribe antibiotics, which is not useful for viral cases. Eventually, Wagner said, this research could impact the development of new tests to determine whether an infection is viral or bacterial, which will then inform physicians whether to prescribe antibiotics in a more targeted way.
“CoSIBS allowed me to gain hands-on experience in biostatistics, a field not widely represented at my undergraduate university. Through CoSIBS, I was able to find a post-graduate field I am passionate about and, ultimately, identify potential future careers,” said Emily Cooper, MS, ’21 a CoSIBS alum.
Kechris, professor and associate director of data science for CIDA said that utilizing biostatistics helps researchers understand the environment and disease risk by testing hypotheses linking environmental exposures to health, such as air pollution and its impact on lung disease, or the effects of high altitude on the risk of low birth weight in cities over 8,500 feet, such as Leadville, Colorado.
This desire to turn numbers and data into meaningful action is also the reason Laurel Beaty, MS, ’21, decided to earn her graduate degree in biostatistics.
It’s not every day that students take what they learn in graduate school and immediately apply it in their job to have a global impact. But for Beaty, that’s exactly what happened after she graduated from ColoradoSPH, then started working for CIDA on the mAb Colorado real-world evidence trial, where she had immediate and actionable impact on monoclonal antibody treatments of COVID-19.
“My job was focused on real-world COVID-19 research. That was awesome and exciting and powerful,” she said. “You got to see the stuff you were doing reflected in policy and in Coloradans getting access to treatment.”
As Beaty began her work as research instructor with CIDA at the height of the COVID pandemic in 2021, she was immediately pulled into action by joining a cross-departmental research team to
analyze the efficacy of treatments used to reduce hospitalizations from SARSCoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 infection. Beaty said that the different variants of COVID responded differently
depending on medication. For example, while Sotrovimab was effective in treating the Delta variant of COVID, it wasn’t as effective with the Omicron variant. While lab data suggested that the efficacy
of Sotrovimab with Omicron was less than with Delta, Beaty said policy makers wanted some real-world evidence to back it up. The mAb Colorado team was one of the first real-world evidence groups to confirm this discovery.
“COVID-19 offered such a unique difficulty because it happened so quickly, but research infrastructure, such as procuring funding, launching new studies, generating data, and developing databases takes time to develop because we want them to be very sound and robust,” Beaty said. “How do you bring that soundness and robustness, that scientific process, to a very quickly moving disease that was super hard to track, especially in those early days?”
The key, she said, was the campus’s interdisciplinary research team, which included community advocates, health system representatives, public health professionals, doctors, patients, ethicists, informaticians, biostatisticians, epidemiologists, mathematicians, and more, to take action.
"I feel we are on the cutting-edge. There is so much national and international collaboration with other experts. They have the biostatistics weekly seminar where they bring in so many experts and that broadens the skills that the team has," said Laurel Beaty.
Before starting her career at the school as a student at ColoradoSPH studying biostatistics, Beaty never felt like just a number in a class. Her professors took a personal interest in her and her peers’ research interests, undergrad experiences, and career goals.
“They went above and beyond. Professors are clearly invested in our individual growth,” Beaty said. “It was a strong community feel.... The professors were involved in helping find jobs, people to interview, and connections with industry. It was just phenomenal.”
She said her coursework and research assistantships well prepared her to jump into the job, even one as demanding as COVID-19 research during the height of the pandemic.
She has found community and belonging as well by joining initiatives such as the search advocate training and the CU Anschutz LGBQT+ Hub.