Ghosh begins biostatistics work at Colorado School of Public Health

​Debashis Ghosh recently became the new chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Informatics, one of the five departments within the Colorado School of Public Health.

“His experience and leadership will strengthen our campus Comprehensive Cancer Center as well as the school’s participation in the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Personalized Medicine,” said Colorado School of Public Health Dean David Goff.

Ghosh is responsible for planning, managing and implementing the academic, service and research initiatives of the department including collaborations between biostatistics faculty and students, and with the school’s institutional, public and community health research partners in the region. He also is an associate director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Personalized Medicine on the Anschutz Medical Campus.

"In virtually all biomedical studies," Ghosh said, "we are collecting more and more data about phenomena where we know less and less. Statistics and Informatics will have a large role to play in how to properly collect, analyze and interpret the data."

He also is seeing additional opportunities for collaboration.

Prior to arriving at CU Anschutz, Ghosh was professor of Statistics and Public Health Sciences at Penn State University where he worked with the Biostatistics and Epidemiology Research Design Group, and he was an affiliate investigator at the Methodology Center and co-director of the Computation, Bioinformatics and Statistics (CBIOS) Training Grant.

Ghosh’s research interests involve two tracks: modeling of genomic data and research methodology in biostatistics. The former has dealt primarily with applications to oncology, and Ghosh was involved with the development of the statistical methods for ONCOMINE, an online data-mining platform used in cancer research and genetics.

He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed articles, commentaries and book chapters in statistical and scientific literature. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and was recently honored with the 2013 Mortimer Spiegelman Award for outstanding early career statistical contributions to public health. Currently, he also serves as chair of the Biostatistical Methods and Research Design (BMRD) Study Section for the National Institutes of Health.

Before he joined Penn State, Ghosh was an assistant and associate professor in the Department of biostatistics at the University of Michigan, and he received his Ph.D. in biostatistics from the University of Washington in 2000.