The University of Iowa College of Public Health has selected Bhramar Mukherjee, PhD, as the 2025 recipient of the Richard and Barbara Hansen Leadership Award. She is the Anna M.R. Lauder Professor of Biostatistics and Professor of Chronic Disease Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health. She also serves as the inaugural Senior Associate Dean of Public Health Data Science and Data Equity at the school.

Hansen Distinguished Lecture

“Ethics, Community, Communication, and Capacity Building: The Four Quadrants of Being a Public Health Statistician” 

Wednesday, April 29, 2026
12:30 to 1:20 p.m.
Callaghan Auditorium (N110 College of Public Health Building)
This event is in-person only.

About the Lecture

• Ethics: AI algorithms and systems developed on exclusionary datasets and biased training corpora can lead to erroneous conclusions and misguided policies, furthering disparities. Statisticians can play a pivotal role in mitigating systematic sources of bias — an expertise that few other quantitative disciplines possess. By addressing selection, information and confounding bias, we can contribute to enhancement of ethics and equity in data science and AI. I will share my recent work on data equity to make this point.
• Community: I urge statisticians to lead efforts for creating, curating, collecting new and better data and pioneering scientific studies, not just remain on the design and analytic fringes. As a public health statistician, my job is not just to predict efficiently, but to prevent effectively by engaging in bi-directional research collaboration with communities near and far. I will share my experiences of building community partnerships in statistics and launching field studies, a path less traveled by a biostatistician.
• Communication: The transformative experience of modeling the SARS-CoV-2 trajectory in India for three years and engaging extensively with global media platforms taught me valuable lessons in scientific communications. It is important that we as statisticians claim our lane and be present in the public eye as a primary and essential form of science.
• Finally, Capacity Building is the only thing that outlives our finite careers. I will share my experience of running a summer health data science program for more than a decade in the United States and creating an adapted version of the program for early career researchers in India.  

About the Speaker

Bhramar Mukherjee is the Anna M.R. Lauder Professor of Biostatistics and Professor of Chronic Disease Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health. Professor Mukherjee serves as the inaugural Senior Associate Dean of Public Health Data Science and Data Equity at the school. She holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Yale University. Dr. Mukherjee also is appointed as an Overseas Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, and a Visiting Faculty at Ashoka University, India.

Prior to joining Yale University in 2024, Dr. Mukherjee built a distinguished career at the University of Michigan, where she was appointed as John D. Kalbfleisch Distinguished University Professor of Biostatistics and served as chair of the Department of Biostatistics (2018-2024).

She is known for her contribution to statistical methods for integration of genetic, environmental, and disease data from large health care databases and for her work on COVID-19 in India. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2023 Karl E. Peace Award for Outstanding Statistical Contributions for the Betterment of Society from the American Statistical Association, and the 2024 Marvin Zelen Leadership in Statistical Science Award from Harvard Biostatistics. She is a fellow of the ASA, IMS, AAAS, and an elected member of the US National Academy of Medicine. She has written more than 425 articles and has supervised 22 PhD and 5 post-doctoral scholars. She is the founding director of several flagship undergraduate summer programs on big data. She is the 2026 President of ENAR, an eminent professional society for biostatisticians.