Debbie Cheng Elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association

Debbie M. Cheng, professor of biostatistics at the Boston University School of Public Health, and faculty affiliate of the Hariri Institute, has been elected a fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA).

ASA Fellowship is one of the highest honors in the statistics profession.  The number of new fellows elected per year is limited to one third of one percent of the membership of the ASA. 

According to her nominator, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Professor Tianxi Cai, Dr. Cheng was chosen for her “outstanding contributions to the application of innovative statistical methods to advance research on substance use and HIV; exceptional leadership of biostatistics shared resources and programs; and excellence in training the next generation of biostatisticians and public health practitioners.” 

Cheng’s research focus is on applied statistics and the design and analysis of clinical trials. She collaborates with investigators worldwide on several projects in the areas of substance abuse and HIV. She is associate director of the Providence/Boston Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) and co-director of the Biostatistics Core for the CFAR. Cheng is also director of the Biostatistics and Data Management (BDM) Core for the International URBAN ARCH Center, which aims to examine the impact of alcohol on multiple aspects of the TB disease continuum. She is the lead statistician for the Massachusetts site of the HEALing Communities Study, a multi-site cluster randomized trial aimed at reducing opioid-related overdose deaths in communities across four different states, the largest study of its kind in addiction science. Cheng is founding director of the Population Health Data Science Program at the School of Public Health.  She has been an instructor for Introduction to Statistical Computing (BS723) and the Design and Conduct of Clinical Trials (BS722).

Learn more about Dr. Cheng’s work here.