News

A summer of biostatistics

By Jennifer New

Published on June 22, 2016

Groups shot of Iowa Summer Institute in Biostatistics 2014
Past participants in the Iowa Summer Institute in Biostatistics

Some students may spend the summer binge-watching Netflix, but another ambitious group of students will be modeling the possibility of the Zika virus traveling to Iowa, predicting crop damage by monkeys on the island of St. Kitts, or looking for geographic clustering patterns of lead poisoning among newborns.

These are some of the projects students will tackle during the Iowa Summer Institute in Biostatistics, one of seven comprehensive summer training courses on biostatistics that is offered around the country with support from the National Institutes of Health’s National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI).

The University of Iowa joined the program, which was started in 2004 to address the growing demand for biostatisticians, in 2010. Recently, Iowa’s funding was renewed to provide a three-year continuation of the program, which has been renamed the Iowa Summer Institute for Research Education in Biostatistics (ISIREB).

A focus on underrepresented students

When former biostatistics department head Kathryn Chaloner decided to apply for NHLBI funding, she wanted the Iowa program to stand apart from others around the country. As a woman who had moved up in a male-dominated field, she had the idea to focus on underrepresented students. Today, this includes women, underrepresented minorities, and students from small colleges who wouldn’t usually be exposed to biostatistics.

The institute, which lasts seven weeks in June and July, is comprised of 18 undergraduates. All of their expenses, including tuition for a 3-semester-hour course, travel, and lodging, are completely covered.

Iowa has been successful at fulfilling Chaloner’s intention, partly due to the tireless recruiting of Gideon Zamba, associate professor of biostatistics and director and PI of ISIREB. He travels year round to colleges and universities across the country, including to Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Latino communities in the southwest, such as Javier Flores’ undergraduate institution in Brownsville, Texas.

“Our mission is to maintain a solid underrepresented minority pipeline into biostatistics graduate programs,” says Zamba. He adds that identifying qualified and interested minority students is not easy: “If you wait for them to come to you, they’ll never come. And so we have developed relationships with minority-serving institutions. This requires our presence. We go and give talks and technical presentations; we field questions. It’s a commitment.”

Hands-on experience

Although the summer institutes around the country all provide students with an overview of the biostatistics field, the Iowa program is unique in that each of the participants is assigned to a project team and a faculty mentor. These projects introduce students to the collaborative nature of the field and to the wide array of health sciences with which biostatisticians interact.

It was this hands-on component of the UI program that particularly attracted Javier Flores; and it was the close connection he made with his mentor, Joe Cavanaugh, during that time that brought him back to Iowa to pursue his doctoral degree.

Although the mission of the program is to interest talented undergraduates in the field, winning students to Iowa is an added bonus of having them on campus. To date, six ISIREB students have enrolled at the University of Iowa; all but one of them was either a woman or an underrepresented minority.

This story originally appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of InSight