As founding director of the Center for Biostatistics and Health Data Science and founding chair of the Department of Biostatistics at Brown’s School of Public Health, Constantine Gatsonis is a singular scholar whose impact transcends generations.
Gatsonis, Henry Ledyard Goddard Professor of Biostatistics, recently concluded his directorship of the center — originally known as the Center for Statistical Studies— after 31 years at the helm of the groundbreaking institution. Rebecca Hubbard, Carl Kawaja and Wendy Holcombe Professor of Public Health, assumed the center directorship this fall.
“My heartfelt gratitude goes to all Brown colleagues — faculty, students and staff — and to our
collaborators around the world during the center’s thirty-year journey,” Gatsonis said. “I look forward to working with many of them in the vibrant terrain of the Center for Biostatistics and Health Data Science.”
A Hellenic journey
Gatsonis was born in Velanidia, Kozani in Western Macedonia, Greece, a small mountain village with a one-room schoolhouse and one telephone, stored in the mayor’s office. Hard working and gifted in mathematics, he came to the United States on a scholarship, studying at Union College and then Princeton before completing a doctorate in mathematical statistics at Cornell.
After graduation, he followed his interests in Bayesian methods, which asks, “‘What is truth? How do we approach it? What is uncertainty?’” Gatsonis explained. “Without it,” he said, “many of the nuances of modern science would have been harder to grasp.”
From there, he went on to hold appointments at Rutgers, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Carnegie Mellon and Harvard Medical School, where he helped form the Department of Health Care Policy.
Then, in 1995, Gatsonis was recruited by Brown University and quickly went to work founding its Center for Statistical Sciences. Under his leadership, the center became a hub for research and training. Its researchers addressed high-impact problems, including Alzheimer’s disease and HIV, while Gatsonis himself served as lead statistician in landmark multi-center studies across the spectrum of cancer care — including the Digital Mammography Imaging Screening Trial, the National Lung Screening Trial and the Tomosynthesis Mammography Imaging Trial.
“The center established Brown as a world class research organization in biostatistics, with special expertise in the study of diagnosis and prediction, causal inference and healthcare research,” Gatsonis explained.
An academic cornerstone of the school
In 2011, Gatsonis became founding chair of Brown’s Department of Biostatistics: one of the four foundational departments of the School of Public Health. In this role, Gatsonis focused on growing the graduate programs in biostatistics, expanding the department and solidifying its role as a structural part of the school.
“It’s difficult to overstate Constantine’s contributions, not only to building a home for statistical sciences at Brown, but to establishing one of the country’s top schools of public health,” said Joseph Hogan, Carole and Lawrence Sirovich Professor of Public Health and chair of the Department of Biostatistics. “A major part of our success has been Constantine’s insistence on combining excellence and rigor in our methodologic research with deep and meaningful engagement in domain-area collaborations.”
Gatsonis’ emphasis on education remains top-of-mind in the department today, where faculty mentor dozens of master and doctoral students, broadening the undergraduate program and offering introductory courses in statistics to ensure Brown students stay current with the fast-moving data revolution.
The work ahead
As she takes the lead of the Center for Biostatistics and Health Data Science, Professor Rebecca Hubbard plans to build on the center’s achievements over the last 30 years, particularly its development of methodologies and expertise in areas such as causal inference, statistics for imaging and Bayesian statistics.
Her vision is to expand outward, sharing the center’s expertise across the University and with community organizations to address some of the pressing problems we face in healthcare, environmental science, engineering and many other areas.
“There’s an explosion of problems that need statistical thinking and we have the expertise to address them,” Hubbard said. She aims to build partnerships, sharing expertise and opening up pathways for affiliates to collaborate with the center. “This way,” she said, “we can bring in capabilities in additional disciplines like computer science, bioengineering and molecular biology to help expand the reach and scope of this work.”
