School News

Summer Institute in Biostatistics and Data Science Celebrates 20 Years

Over the past two decades, the influential training program has shifted focus from building a pipeline of future biostatisticians to expanding the diversity of future biostatisticians.

In 2004, the Boston University School of Public Health was one of only three schools in the United States to receive federal funding for a new innovative summer program designed with one lofty aim: to help introduce undergraduates to the field of biostatistics.

Twenty years later, the Summer Institute in Biostatistics (SIBS) has grown to 10 participating schools and associated research centers spanning the nation, sponsored by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), two of the 27 institutes and centers under the umbrella of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

After its modest start, and as a direct result of two decades of steady growth, the program has been hailed as one of the most successful programs to encourage promising students to enter advanced study in biostatistics. Over the years, the SIBS program has been able to “shift focus from building a pipeline of future biostatisticians to expanding the diversity of future biostatisticians,” said Lisa Sullivan, associate dean for education at BUSPH, where about 90 percent of SIBS students eventually pursue graduate study in biostatistics.

“One constant throughout the 20 years has been the quality of the SIBS students,” said Sullivan, who is one of the initial co-principal investigators of SIBS. “The first year and every year since, we’ve all been amazed by the dedication, curiosity, thoughtfulness, and abilities of the students who chose to spend six weeks of their summer break learning biostatistics.”

To help acknowledge and celebrate the milestone, the School recently hosted “Building A Diverse Biostatistics Pipeline: The Next Decade,” a wide-ranging discussion of the past, current, and future challenges surrounding the field. Sullivan recounted that, contrary to the early days of SIBS, more current students apply with some prior knowledge of biostatistics and some may have already taken one or two introductory courses by the time they apply to the program.

Back in 2004, statistical programming was new to almost all SIBS students. “Now more than half are likely to have some statistical computing experience,” Sullivan said, enabling many SIBS instructors to delve slightly deeper in both SAS and R, two widely used statistical programming languages. Reflecting this growth, the name of the program was changed to the Summer Institute for Biostatistics and Data Science to better account for the changes within the field—especially the importance of data science in infectious disease monitoring.

Jacqueline Milton Hicks, a clinical associate professor of biostatistics and a current co-principal investigator of SIBS, outlined several emerging issues within biostatistics that programs like SIBS are uniquely positioned to address. People who are more likely to be affected by disparities in health outcomes are more likely to be Black, Hispanic, Native American, and other underrepresented groups, Hicks said. Members of those groups are also less likely to pursue study in STEM fields, and therefore, less likely to be biostatisticians.

“Biostatistics has always had a problem of diversity,” Hicks said, “What we have done to help this problem is try to introduce a diverse student body into grad schools by trying to recruit more undergrads into the biostatistics field.”

Anita DeStefano, professor of biostatistics and former co-PI of SIBS, said the immersive nature of the course enables faculty to show bright young scholars a path to a successful career as a biostatistician. “We show them how to conduct research, but more importantly, we show them what it is like to ‘be’ a biostatistician—how collaborative it, different areas of focus such as infectious disease modeling, clinical trials, and statistical genetics, and the huge impact biostatisticians have on health and medical care. We show them the possibilities and then we show them how to get there.”

During the live event, several former SIBS students commented on the guidance their instructors continued to offer long after the program ended, an observation DeStefano corroborated with her own experience. The connections with students aren’t limited to the time they’re at BU in SIBS, she said, “but in the years after with advice on courses, graduate programs, and writing letters. Without a doubt there are scores of biostatisticians contributing to the field, who never would have been there without SIBS.” 

One of the early SIBS instructors who tried to made a difference was Lori Chibnik, a biostatistician and adjunct assistant professor at SPH with a joint appointment in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Department of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School. Chibnik, one of the first instructors of the BU SIBS program, moderated the panel of former students and made sure to mention some of the past educators who helped make a difference.

She recalled a flurry of renowned educators stopping into the program to guest lecture, or show the students new clinical trial results, or the latest case study of an outbreak of food poisoning. Kimberly Dukes, Michael Pencina, Alexa Beiser, Wayne LaMorte, Leonard Glantz, Adrienne Cupples, Bill Bicknell, Joe Massaro, Ralph D’Agostino, Diana Bianchi, and many others over the years, did their part to make biostatistics come alive, Chibnik said. Their involvement turned the summer institute into a fun and engaging “Statistics Camp.”

In the audience, students currently in the six-week program heard compelling personal stories from a panel of former students whose lives and careers had been positively affected by their participation in SIBS.

Taylor Mahoney attended the SIBS program in 2013 after her sophomore year at Simmons University and described her time in SIBS as one of the major drivers behind her eventual career choice.

“If it hadn’t been for SIBS I wouldn’t be sitting here today,” said Mahoney, currently a senior biostatistician at Avania, a medical technology company in Burlington, Mass. “I was fortunate enough to go to a college that had a biostats major, but I picked it just so I wouldn’t have to major in biology. I knew I liked math and was good at math, but I absolutely hated zoology.”

Mahoney said the energy and attentiveness that the faculty showed during that relatively brief summer was eye-opening. “They really showed me how much they loved their career, they loved what they were doing and they cared so much for their work and for the students. So that for me was enough to make me want to go into biostatistics—and do it here with them.”

After completing her bachelors in biostatistics at Simmons, Mahoney enrolled at SPH for graduate study in biostatistics, eventually earned her PhD in 2021 and returned to help teach SIBS that summer.