Bhramar Mukherjee | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | October 22, 1973 |
| Nationality (legal) | American |
| Citizenship | America |
| Occupation(s) | Biostatistician, data scientist, professor and researcher. |
| Title | John D Kalbfleisch Distinguished University Professor of Biostatistics, Siobán D. Harlow Collegiate Professor of Public Health and Chair of Biostatistics. |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Presidency College (BSc) Indian Statistical Institute (M.Stat) Purdue University (MS, PhD) |
| Thesis | Optimal designs for estimating the path of a stochastic process. (2001) |
| Doctoral advisor | William J. Studden |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | University of Michigan |
Bhramar Mukherjee is an Indian-American biostatistician, data scientist, professor and researcher. She has been appointed as the inaugural Senior Associate Dean of Public Health Data Science and Data Equity at the Yale School of Public Health starting August 1, 2024.[1] She currently works as the John D. Kalbfleisch Distinguished University Professor of Biostatistics, Siobán D. Harlow Collegiate Professor of Public Health and the Chair of Department of Biostatistics, a professor of epidemiology and global public health at the University of Michigan.[2] She serves as the associate director for Quantitative Data Sciences at University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center.[3] Mukherjee holds a Senior Honorary Visiting Fellow position at the Biostatistics Unit of the Medical Research Council, working on the theme of population health at the University of Cambridge, UK.[4] She has served as the past Chair for Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) for a three-year term 2019-2021.[5]
Mukherjee's research has been focused on the development and application of statistical methods in epidemiology, environmental health and disease risk assessment. She has authored over 360 articles in statistics, biostatistics, epidemiology and medical Journals. She has led several federally funded grants as a principal investigator. Her focus has been to integrate diverse data sources for efficient inference.[6]
Mukherjee is a fellow of the American Statistical Association[7] and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.[8] She was elected as a member of the National Academy of Medicine in 2022.[9]
Mukherjee was born and raised in Kolkata, India. She received her B.Sc. in statistics from Presidency College in Kolkata in 1994 and her M.Stat from Indian Statistical Institute in 1996. At the completion of her M.Stat, The Ramakrishna Mission awarded her the Debesh-Kamal scholarship for studying abroad and Mukherjee moved to the United States, where she received her M.S. in mathematical statistics in 1999 and then her Ph.D. in statistics in 2001, both from Purdue University.[7][10] Her advisor was William J. Studden and her thesis title was "Optimal designs for estimating the path of a stochastic process".[11]
After completing her Ph.D., Mukherjee joined University of Florida as an assistant professor of Statistics and taught there until 2006, when she left to join the University of Michigan as the John G. Searle Assistant Professorship.[7] In 2009, she became associate professor and in 2013, full professor. She was awarded the John D. Kalbfleisch Collegiate Professorship at the University of Michigan in 2015.[10] She was appointed the associate chair of Department of Biostatistics at University of Michigan in 2014 and became the first woman chair of the department in 2018.[2]
In 2016, Mukherjee was appointed the associate director of cancer control and population studies at University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center, where she led the Cancer Center's research on cancer screening, epidemiology and prevention, as well as research on cancer outcomes, disparities and new models of cancer care delivery. After 4 years in this role she transitioned as the newly appointed associate director for Quantitative Data Sciences in 2020.[3]
Mukherjee is the founding director of a cross-disciplinary summer institute at the School of Public Health[12] to train undergraduates at the intersection of big data and human health. She has served as the cohort development core co-director in the University of Michigan's Precision Health Initiative and leads the Center for Precision Health Data Science.[13]
Mukherjee was the statistics editor for the American Journal of Preventive Medicine from 2013 to 2014, an Associate Editor of Statistics in Medicine from 2015 to 2018, and an Associate Editor of Biometrics from 2008 to 2018. She has served on the editorial board of the Harvard Data Science Review[14] and Genetic Epidemiology.[15] She is currently an Associate Editor for Science Advances.
Mukherjee's research has primarily focused on the development and application of statistical methods in epidemiology and disease risk assessment. Her interests include electronic health records, shrinkage methods, data integration, modeling of high dimensional exposure data and studies of gene-environment interaction. Her collaborations span in the areas of reproductive epidemiology, cancer epidemiology and environmental health. She has authored over 360 articles in scientific journals and has led several federally funded grants as principal investigator.[2][16] Mukherjee is currently serving as one of the principal investigators of a large cohort building grant MI-CARES (Michigan Cancer and Research on the Environment Study),[17] studying the impact of toxic exposures on cancer risks in Michigan residents.
One of the focal points of Mukherjee's research is to understand how the interaction between genes and environment increases or decreases cancer risk. In this area, she has studied how lifestyle factors such as diet and physical activity coupled with the genetic makeup of an individual impact their cancer risk. She has also worked on developing models that use genetic data to predict which individuals have a higher cancer risk.[18] In 2018, Mukherjee and her colleagues conducted a phenome-wide association study to see if the polygenic risk scores for different cancers are associated with multiple phenotypes. Their study showed that polygenic risk scores can help in stratifying the risk of different cancers in patients.[19][20] During the COVID-19 pandemic, Mukherjee and her study team took an active role in modeling the transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in India. This work received significant attention from the media [21] and from the scientific community.[22]
