Chats with the Chairs: Robert A. Perera, Department of Biostatistics
The School of Public Health department chairs share their perspectives about the mission, focus and future of each department.
By Hanna Wente
VCU’s School of Public Health brings together the departments of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, Health Policy and Social and Behavioral Sciences, each with its own mission, but with a unified focus on public health. After our first full year as VCU’s newest school, we sat down with each of the chairs for a closer look at what’s going on in each department.
First in this series of Q&As is Robert A. Perera, Ph.D., associate professor and interim chair of the Department of Biostatistics. To read our conversations with the other chairs, click here.
How does the Department of Biostatistics fit into VCU’s School of Public Health?
Biostatistics is integral to every aspect of the study of public health. Our department focuses on developing novel statistical methodologies that will solve the challenges associated with public health research. That touches epidemiology, health policy, social and behavioral health, medicine, mental health and more.
What is the mission of the Department of Biostatistics?
Our mission is to improve human health, which is very broad, but given all the areas that we touch as biostatisticians, that’s a pretty fair assessment. The way we do that is through collaborative research, such as working with the researchers from the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences on their behavioral interventions or developing new therapies with the School of Medicine.
Our faculty are developing new statistical methods to apply to science, so we’re also here to make science better. There’s that methodological research piece that gets applied to these collaborations.
The other important piece is the training aspect of our mission. Part of it is our own graduate programs, training future biostatisticians. Then there’s training students from other disciplines. Every student in the School of Public Health will take biostats courses, students across the university take biostats courses, so it’s training them in statistical literacy, statistical thinking and how to apply statistical methods to their studies.
What is your leadership philosophy?
The first thing that’s important to me in this role is thinking about it as service to the department, service to my faculty and service to my students. My job is about facilitating the success of the department, and the success of the department is the success of its people. It’s about serving others, so that’s something that’s really core to me in leadership.
What excites you most about what the department is doing right now?
It’s incredibly exciting to be part of the new school. It’s rare for a university to establish one, and having the opportunity to shape its direction is very rewarding.
More specifically for the department, we’ve launched an online program for the first time. We’re the first department in the school to have an online program, so that’s obviously a new frontier. We’re able to make higher learning more accessible to folks it may not be accessible to otherwise, like people with full time jobs or other commitments that need that flexibility of an asynchronous program.
What are your hopes for the future of your department?
We have an excellent set of faculty here who deeply care about student success, and who are passionate about the research they do. Facilitating faculty success and fostering their methodological innovation can create a broad, lasting impact. As we move to the new School of Public Health, education remains central and we’re well-poised to be a leader.
Categories Department news