Looking for Biostatistics PhD Programs with Neuroscience Focus

[Guest dot.matrix]

Hello there,

I am looking for biostatistics PhD programs that have either an explicit neuroscience track or a large number of faculty involved in neuroscience/psychiatric research and the opportunity to concentrate in these areas. I was wondering if anyone here might be able to recommend programs I may be overlooking and let me know whether the ones I have found seem to be good fits.

My background:

BS in biochemistry, premed coursework, GPA 3.44, major GPA 3.72.

Currently enrolled in MS in biostatistics program, GPA 3.77, working as teaching assistant. My thesis project is focused on sample size determination method for time course microarray experiments. The program is new and unranked, affiliated with a medical school that is highly ranked in primary care and moderately high in research.

GRE: 165 V, 170 Q, 4.5 W.

I plan to take linear algebra and advanced calculus this summer. In undergrad I had 4 quarters of calculus (3 As and a B in calc III) and differential equations (A).

The schools I am considering:

- Johns Hopkins Biostatistics - My interests seem to mesh pretty well with the work being done by faculty in the SMART group. I just took the MOOC Computing for Data Analysis with professor Roger Peng and I follow the Simply Statistics blog. I think I would like the atmosphere and the faculty here but I know the program is small and admission is competitive.

- Carnegie Mellon PhD program in Neural Computation - I really haven't looked too much at computational neuroscience programs other than this one, which I learned about recently through an article by statistician Rob Kass. The Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC) seems right up my alley, would be guaranteed to work on neuro research but would be more narrowly focused training program. After learning about this one I started to wonder whether I ought to look at more comp neuro programs rather than biostat…

- Emory Biostatistics - Biostatistics in Genetics, Immunology, and Neuroimaging training program. Lots of faculty seem to be doing work in neuroimaging at this school.

- University of Pittsburg Biostatistics - Partner with Carnegie Mellon at the CNBC, several faculty involved in neuro research and also very good neuroscience and psychiatry programs.

- University of Pennsylvania Biostatistics

- Columbia Biostatistics

- Harvard Biostatistics

I’m a little concerned that maybe I do not have enough safety schools. Based on the rankings I've seen and discussion I've read here, it seems that U Penn, U Pittsburg, and Emory may be a little easier to get into. Not sure about the selectivity of the Carnegie Mellon program. Harvard may be a stretch, and I'm not really sure if it would be the best fit. I've looked at the MIT/Harvard Medical Engineering and Medical Physics program, in particular the Neuroimaging Training Program, and I am very interested in the research associated with this program, but this seems to be more for physics and engineering oriented students.

Other programs I have considered but seem to be more statistical genetics focused than neuroscience are UW and UC Berkeley. UNC maybe has a little more neuroscience going on but the location doesn’t appeal to me as much. Michigan I have eliminated as well due to location and not a great deal of neuroscience focus.

Thanks for any suggestions and feedback, let me know if anything needs clarification.

[cyberwulf]

A few thoughts:

1) I generally caution prospective biostatistics graduate students against getting overly specific in their interests when picking schools to apply to/attend. Most students end up working in an area very different than the one they initially planned on; that is the nature of the discipline. Accordingly, you don't want to pass up an opportunity to attend a better school because it appears that they have fewer researchers in your particular area. That impression might be wrong; faculty biosketches are notorious for being imprecise and out of date,

2) The fact that a school has a good neuroscience and/or psychiatry program should carry little weight in your choice of biostatistics programs. First, I would suggest that virtually all the places you have listed will have "good enough" programs in these areas that, should you want to pursue research along these lines, you would be able to find ample opportunities. Second, you will be working on your primary research with an adviser in biostatistics, so the quality of potential biostatistics faculty advisers is vastly more important than the quality of faculty in other parts of the university (most of whom you are unlikely to work with, or even meet).

3) UNC has a strong neuroscience imaging group led by Hongtu Zhu; if you're truly serious about combining biostat and neuroscience, you might want to give Chapel Hill another look.

4) Your likelihood of admission to the places you list will depend a lot on your undergraduate (and current graduate) institution. Unless you attended a truly elite college, Hopkins and Harvard are likely out of reach. The other places seem more reasonable targets, though I would suggest expanding your list a little bit.

[Guest dot.matrix]

Thanks for your reply cyberwolf, I was hoping you would weigh in on this.

Regarding (1) I have been obsessed, you could say, with neuroscience and psychiatry for at least 10 years now. I am in my early 30's, I feel like my scientific interests are pretty much well established at this point. I can't imagine anything that would be more fascinating to study than sciences of the mind and brain. Maybe some things in genetics or genomics, but again I find those most interesting in relation to their implications for study of the mind and brain. I have considered going to graduate school in psychology or some field of neuroscience, and more recently was planning to attend medical school to specialize in psychiatry. I started a biostatistics program at the suggestion of my employer (an emergency physician) because there are some aspects of my undergraduate transcript that might raise some concerns - a couple of Ws, for example, and it took me a long time to finish undergrad as I was rather adrift before I settled on a premed program - so she thought it would be to my benefit to have more recent solid grades for medical school. Over the past two years I have worked closely with physicians as an emergency department scribe and a physician Epic (electronic medical record) tutor. Through this experience, seeing what physicians do in their daily work, I discovered that I would be more interested in a career in research and teaching (I have 7 years of experience as a math and science tutor, which I love). Biostatistics brings together my interest in mathematics and biological sciences, and approaching mind/brain science from a quantitative perspective would be like the ultimate confluence of my interests (which also includes the philosophy associated with each of these subjects).

I understand that statisticians have quite often worked in the role of consultant, maybe this is what you are referring to when you say it is the nature of the discipline, to work on a broad range of subject matter. I have read two articles recently that have stressed the notion that in the future biostatiticians and statisticians in general will benefit from specialization in a particular area of application. Brown, EN and Kass RE. 2009. What is Statistics? The American Statistician 63:2, 105-110, and Gehan, EA. 2000. Biostatistics in the new millennium: a consulting statistician's perspective. Statistical Methods in Medical Research 9, 3-16. I am looking for programs that are amenable to this philosophy and provide opportunity for students to develop expertise in a cognate area.

The curriculum of the Carnegie Mellon program actually seems more directly relevant to my interests. I love biostatistics but ultimately I am interested in applications to specific scientific problems. I'm not quite sure how happy I would be having to do substantial amount of work in an area unrelated to my interests, which is why I started thinking about looking at more computational neuroscience programs.

2) Good point. I figured I might be more likely to find more biostatistics faculty working in neuro subjects at schools who receive a lot of funding in these areas, but I understand I should look primarily at what the biostat faculty are working on.

3) I decided last night to put UNC back on my list precisely because of Hongtu Zhu's work there, and it wouldn't be too difficult to add another school to the SOPHAS designations.

4) This is a little disappointing to hear but thank you for saying so, you are probably correct. I went to a large state university that is not very impressive, and my transcript is certainly not spotless. I have no publications, honors, or scholarships. My strengths seem to be my test scores (also have a very good MCAT score which may be mostly irrelevant to biostat programs), strong math and science GPA, good letters of rec, and a very large amount of math and science tutoring experience. I think I may still give those two a shot though just to see. I would be pretty thrilled to get in to the Carnegie Mellon program or Emory's program. UNC is, I would imagine, just as difficult to get in to as Harvard or JHU. If you have any other suggestions for schools to expand my list, please let me know.

I apologize for this being so lengthy. Thanks again, your comments in this forum have been very helpful.

[cyberwulf]

I understand that statisticians have quite often worked in the role of consultant, maybe this is what you are referring to when you say it is the nature of the discipline, to work on a broad range of subject matter. I have read two articles recently that have stressed the notion that in the future biostatiticians and statisticians in general will benefit from specialization in a particular area of application. I am looking for programs that are amenable to this philosophy and provide opportunity for students to develop expertise in a cognate area.

While I think biostatistics field is heading towards earlier specialization, I don't think we have yet come to a point where employers are demanding domain-specific skills from new graduates. Rather, searches are typically organized around a set of (bio)statistical skills (eg. causal inference, diagnostic testing, survival analysis, spatial statistics) which can be applied in a range of clinical domains. Specialization comes gradually, after you have worked on specific projects for awhile. My worry is that pigeon-holing yourself as, say, a "neuroscience biostatistician" will needlessly narrow the set of positions you would be competitive for. In academia, for example, the top 20 biostatistics departments each average roughly 1 open position per year; I'd be surprised if more than 1-2 (if any) list neuroscience as a specialization of interest. I suspect that demand (as a fraction of available positions) is even lower in the private sector, where most hiring of biostatisticians is done by pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers. Outside of a handful of top people, few faculty biostatisticians are "paying the bills" (obtaining grant funding and consulting on funded projects) entirely through neuroscience-related research. So, to the degree that it's possible, I think it's good policy to keep an open mind to other areas of application.

UNC is, I would imagine, just as difficult to get in to as Harvard or JHU. If you have any other suggestions for schools to expand my list, please let me know.

Not really. It's still an excellent program, but it's larger than both Harvard and Johns Hopkins, and the applicant pool isn't quite as strong. Further, they also offer unfunded PhD spots (not that you would necessarily want to accept such an offer...)

Edited November 1, 2012 by cyberwulf

[Guest dot.matrix]

Well, this has given me some things to think about. It seems that given my interest in a particular subject matter, and given the nature of the biostatistics field, I am coming at things from the wrong direction. It seems that I should actually be looking at neuroscience programs.