SPH Tenures 3 Junior Faculty Members

One of the fastest-growing departments at the Harvard School of Public Health (SPH) has tenured three professors from its own junior faculty, SPH officials announced earlier this month.

After conducting a nationwide search to fill three openings in the Biostatistics Department, SPH officials decided to give the three spots to Associate Professors of Biostatistics Stephen W. Lagakos, Nan M. Laird and James H. Ware, said Assistant Dean for Public Affairs Jay A. Winsten.

"This is a golden age for biostatistical science," said Professor of Statistical Science Marvin Zelen, who chairs the department. "More people are using the ideas of probability and statistics for a better understanding of biomedical problems."

The Biostatistics department, which currently has 28 faculty members, has nearly tripled in size since 1976 and has greatly expanded the breadth of its research and teaching.

Almost all students at SPH now take some biostatistics courses, and Harvard Medical School requires students to pass a biostatics competency test before graduation, Zelen said.

Similiar to most schools at Harvard, the SPH does not have an established tenure track for its junior faculty, Winsten said.

But Zelen said he was not suprised that the search committees selected members of the junior faculty. "We have a very distinguished department. All of [the three new professors] should have been professors someplace long ago," he said.

Winsten attributed the in-house selections to the past history of Biostatistics at Harvard. "They made a substantial number of high-quality appointments to the junior faculty about seven years ago. Now you're seeing the results," he said. "This is the baby-boom generation of the biostatistics department."

Each of the three new professors specializes in a different facet of biostatistics.

"I work on methods for combining information from different sources and resolving controversies that arise. I also developed a method for analyzing problems [with] missing data," Laird said.

Lagakos' work focusses on statistically tracing the progress of illnesses. In 1984 he conducted a study of leukemia in Woburn with Zelen. Their work has been cited as an important piece of evidence in a toxic waste suit, which is currently in trial. Lagakos could not be reached for comment.

Ware works primarily on enviromental problems like indoor air pollution. He recently published a study on the pre-adolescent children of smokers.