UCLA Fielding announces new senior associate dean for academic programs
After five years of service in the role of senior associate dean for academic programs at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, Dr. Yifang Zhu will return fulltime to teaching and research on July 1. During Zhu’s tenure as senior associate dean, she led UCLA Fielding’s successful CEPH reaccreditation process, significantly improved educational programs for students, and recruited and retained exceptional faculty.
Dr. Sudipto Banerjee — chair and professor in the Department of Biostatistics — will begin as the new senior associate dean for academic programs at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health on July 1.
“I am immeasurably grateful to Dr. Zhu for the many ways that her leadership has contributed to the excellence of our school,” said Dr. Ron Brookmeyer, dean and distinguished professor of biostatistics. “And I am thrilled that Dr. Banerjee will become the new senior associate dean for academic programs at UCLA Fielding. This position is central to the academic wellness of our school.”
Banerjee has led the Department of Biostatistics since autumn 2014. As chair, he has overseen a marked increase in the department’s grants and contracts, and the start of FSPH’s new professional degree program, the Master of Data Science in Health, which will be housed in the Department of Biostatistics and welcome its first cohort in autumn 2023.
In addition to Banerjee’s current roles as professor and chair of biostatistics at UCLA Fielding, he also holds a faculty appointment in UCLA’s Department of Statistics and an affiliate appointment in UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. His research expertise includes Bayesian hierarchical modeling and inference for complex systems involving massive datasets ("big data"), environmental processes and their impact on public health, survey sampling and survival analysis, and more. In November 2020, Banerjee was elected president of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA) — an international society with members from nearly 50 nations across the world — and will continue to serve as past-president of ISBA through December 31.
Scholarship, leadership, and research by Banerjee have been recognized with honors including the American Public Health Association’s Mortimer Spiegelman Award, the George W. Snedecor Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies, and the Abdel El-Shaarawi Award from the International Environmetric Society.
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