Johns Hopkins University Department of biostatistics

Abstract

The Johns Hopkins Department of Biostatistics was established in 1918, the first of its kind. This article provides an overview to its key personalities and traditions, and its accomplishments in research and education, over its long history, and it briefly surveys the Hopkins Statistics Department and its successors. Research advancements include methodologies relating to population growth, epidemic modeling, survival function estimation (e.g. Kaplan-Meier), survey sampling, longitudinal data analysis, likelihood-based inference and causal inference as well as discovery related to vaccines, the deleterious effects of smoking, the HIV epidemic, genomic and biological determinants of health, environmental determinants of health, measurements of massive dimension, and many other aspects of public health and medicine. The trajectory of the department as a leader in public health education is tracked from its inception to the present day. The department looks forward to a future that is serving up spectacular problems for statistical science.