Directors

CO-DIRECTORS

Brent Coull
Brent Coull, PhD; (Professor of Biostatistics and Professor of Environmental Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health) is the Principal Investigator (PI) and Program Director of the training program. Dr. Coull has served as PI for this training grant since 2003. Since 2005, we have run the program by an executive committee comprising of the three or four core faculty who devote all of their research effort to quantitative methods in the environmental health sciences. Drs. Coull, Dominici, and Lin comprise the Executive Committee, with Dr. Coull serving as Director and Drs. Dominici and Lin serving as Co-directors. This Executive Committee meets regularly, discussing all administrative and academic management issues related to the program.

In addition to his current experience in this role, Dr. Coull has 20 years’ experience in a wide range of environmental health research, including extensive  work on the development and application of statistical methods for the assessment of the health effects of air pollution and children’s environmental health. Dr. Coull is currently the Principal Investigator of the Environmental Statistics and Bioinformatics Core of the NIEHS Center for Environmental Health and Associate Director of the Harvard-EPA Air, Climate, and Energy (ACE) Research Center (Center PI: Petros Koutrakis).  In this latter center, he is Principal Investigator of the project “Sub-Regional Air Pollutant Mixtures (Massachusetts): Spatio-temporal Trends, Effects of Modifiable Factors and Climate, and Multi-resolution Analysis”.  He currently serves as a subcontract PI of the NIEHS-funded Children’s Health Exposure Analysis Resource (CHEAR) data analysis center, and is co-investigator or consultant on three different cohort studies in the NIH’s program on Environmental Influences on Children’s Health (ECHO).  He also serves as co-investigator on several other NIEHS-funded R-mechanism grants. His primary research interests focus on integrative modeling of exposure data collected at multiple spatial and temporal scales, measurement error issues associated with the use of outputs from such models in risk assessments, and methods for analyzing the health effects of complex environmental mixtures.  Dr. Coull has served as a member of multiple U.S. EPA advisory committees and is currently a standing member on the NIH study section IRAP, which reviews grant applications on the impacts of environmental exposures on birth and reproductive outcomes.

Francesca Dominici
Francesca Dominici, PhD; (Professor of Biostatistics and Associate Dean of Information Technology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health) serves as Program Co-director. Dr. Dominici is a data scientist who has focused broadly on developing and advancing methods for the analysis of large heterogeneous data sets to identify and understand the health impacts of environmental threats and inform policy. She has expertise in the development of Bayesian methods and causal inference. She is currently co-PI of the Project “A causal inference framework to support policy decisions by evaluating the effectiveness of past and future air pollution control strategies” in the Harvard-EPA Air, Climate, and Energy (ACE) Center, and co-PI, with Dr. Lin, of an NCI-funded P01 grant “Statistical Informatics in Cancer Research”.  She is also the PI of a large grant funded by the Health Effects Institute to develop methods in causal inference and estimate health effects of exposure to low ambient levels of air pollution. Dr. Dominici was recognized in Thomson Reuter’s 2015 list of the most highly cited researchers, ranking in the top 1% of scientists cited in her field.

In her current role as co-director of the the Harvard Data Science Initiative, Dr. Dominici and her co-Director, Professor David Parkes, Area Dean of Computer Science, are building a cohesive data science community, bringing together scholars from across disciplines and schools. In addition to carrying out the academic plan of the Initiative, she oversees the operations and distribution of seed funding and helps to raise funds to support its key programmatic activities. She serves as a critical link between this Program’s training in data science and similar efforts across Harvard University.

Xihong Lin
Xihong Lin, PhD; (Professor of Biostatistics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health) also serves as Program Co-director. She is an integral part of the Environmental Statistics Training Program in that she heads our effort on statistical ‘omics research in the environmental health sciences. She is a leading expert on genome-wide association studies, whole genome sequencing association studies, gene-environment interactions, genome-wide DNA methylation studies, pathway and network analysis, and integrative genetics and genomics. She is also well known for her work in nonparametric and semiparametric regression methods, and longitudinal data analysis such as mixed models. Her methodological research is supported by an NCI Outstanding Investigator Award. She is also the contact PI of the NCI P01 grant, with Dr. Dominici, on Statistical Informatics in Cancer Research, and the contact PI of the NHGRI U01 grant on of the Analysis Center of the Genome Sequencing Program (GSP). Dr. Lin has collaborated extensively with molecular and genetic epidemiologists, and environmental health scientists at HSPH and HMS. She is the lead statistician in the HSPH GWAS lung cancer study and acute lung injury GWAS consortium, of the sleep apnea genetic epidemiology consortium, several environmental epigenetic studies, and the coordinator of the GSP Methods Working Group. She was the Director of the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Core of the recently completed HSPH Superfund Research Program.

Executive Committee

We propose an Executive Committee for this training program of five Biostatistics faculty. Co-Directors Drs. Coull, Dominici, and Lin will constitute three members of the Executive Committee. This cycle, we also propose to leverage the enormous talents of two Assistant Professors of Biostatistics, Drs. Rachel Nethery and Rajarshi Mukherjee. Dr. Rachel Nethery is a third year Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics. She was supported by NIEHS T32 funding as a pre-doctoral fellow at UNC-Chapel Hill and by this training program as a postdoctoral fellow. She is now the PI of an NIEHS K01 grant. Her research interests focus on statistical methods for climate epidemiology and studies of environmental contaminants and health. She serves as advisor or co-advisor for several current trainees of this program (Josey, Lee, Considine, Chen). Dr. Rajarshi Mukerjee is a fourth year Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics, coming to Harvard as faculty at UC Berkeley. Dr. Mukherjee is PI of a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant and co-investigator in the Harvard Superfund Research Program and on an NIEHS-funded R01 project (ES031943; PI). He is an expert on semiparametric theory and methods for causal inference in high-dimensional data. He co-advises a current T32 trainee (Howe) and several other doctoral students in the Environmental Statistics Program.

PRIMARY PRECEPTORS

Tianxi Cai, ScD; Professor, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Sebastien Haneuse, PhD; Professor, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Peter Kraft, PhD; Professor, Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Christoph Lange, PhD; Professor, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School).

Liming Liang, PhD; Associate Professor of Statistical Genetics,Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Junwei Lu, PhD; Assistant Professor, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Rajarshi Mukherjee, PhD; Assistant Professor, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Rachel Nethery, PhD; Assistant Professor, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

JP Onnela, PhD; Associate Professor of Biostatistics, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

James Robins, PhD; Professor, Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Briana Stephenson, PhD; Professor, Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Tyler VanderWeele, PhD; Professor, Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Paige Williams, PhD; Senior Lecturer on Biostatistics, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

SECONDARY PRECEPTORS

David Christiani, PhD; Professor, Departments of Environmental Health and Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School / Director, Harvard Education and Research Center for Occupational Safety and Health / Physician, Massachusetts General Hospital).

Diane Gold, MD, MPH; Professor, Department of Environmental Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School).

Jaime Hart, PhD; Associate Professor, Department of Environmental Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Russ Hauser, MD, ScD; Professor, Departments of Environmental Health and Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology, Harvard Medical School.

Tamarra James-Todd, PhD; Mark and Catherine Winkler Assistant Professor of Environmental Reproductive and Perinatal Epidemiology, Department of Environmental Health Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Susan Korrick, MD, MPH; Assistant Professor, Department of Environmental Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School).

Petros Koutrakis, PhD; Professor, Department of Environmental Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Nancy Krieger, PhD; Professor, Department of Society, Human Development, and Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (Co-Director, Interdisciplinary Concentration on Women, Gender and Health, Harvard School of Public Health / Chair, Spirit of 1848 Caucus, American Public Health Association).

Francine Laden, ScD; Professor, Departments of Environmental Health and Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School).

Quan Lu, PhD; Professor of Environmental Genetics and Physiology, Department of Environmental Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Shruthi Mahalingaiah, MD: Assistant Professor of Environmental, Reproductive, and Women’s Health, Department of Environmental Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Maitreyi Mazumdar, PhD; Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Health, Department of Environmental Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Murray Mittleman, MDCM, DrPH, MPH; Professor, Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School /Director of the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Research Unit and Associate Director of the Harvard Catalyst (CTSC) Biostatistics Consulting program, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center).

Emily Oken, PhD; Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Department of Nutrition, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Joel Schwartz, PhD; Professor, Departments of Environmental Health and Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School).

John Spengler, PhD; Professor, Department of Environmental Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Marc Weisskopf, PhD; Professor of Environmental and Occupational Epidemiology, Department of Environmental Health and Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.