Congratulations to associate professor Chris Slaughter on his election to the Academy for Excellence in Education. Dr. Slaughter has been teaching at Vanderbilt University since 2007, after earning his doctorate in public health (DrPH) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Initially serving as an instructor in the Division of Clinical Pharmacology and the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Biological and Biomedical Sciences, he was integrally involved in the founding of the Department of Biostatistics’ Graduate Program, creating the “Modern Regression Analysis” course that to this day remains a cornerstone of the training we provide. He has also contributed his highly effective teaching skills and experience to the Division of Epidemiology, where he has taught “Design and Analysis of Time to Event Data” for more a decade and was honored as Teacher of the Year by its doctoral cohort in 2023. As a member of the American Statistical Association’s Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences Section, he’s applied ideas from its workshops to the design of both on-site and online offerings by our department, from core curricula required of all MS and PhD biostatistics students to “Data Science Workflow for Clinical Trial Data,” a module he is developing for our video-based Coursera program.
Dr. Slaughter has also served as a highly regarded mentor and advisor for a wide variety of trainees, from gifted undergraduates to PhD candidates and fellow investigators, not only in biostatistics but also epidemiology, pediatrics, neonatology, gastroenterology, biology, pharmacology, pulmonology, and other specialties across the biomedical research spectrum. A consummate team scientist, Dr. Slaughter has co-authored more than 200 peer-reviewed articles, including recent pediatric and heart disease papers in the New England Journal of Medicine, Diseases of the Esophagus, Muscle & Nerve, Journal of Perinatology, and American Journal of Gastorenterology.
The Department of Biostatistics has a significant presence in the Academy for Excellence in Education: associate professor Mario Davidson was the 2022 recipient of the Geoffrey David Chazen Faculty Award for Innovation in Medical Education and is director-elect of the AEE board; additional members include professors Cindy Chen, Bill Dupont, and Yu Shyr, and associate professors Hakmook Kang, Rameela Raman, and Andrew Spieker. The Academy also runs the Fleming Society mentorship program: assistant professor Amber Hackstadt and Dr. Spieker were members of the inaugural cohort, and assistant professor Amir Asiaee and research associate professor Laurie Samuels were selected for the 2023–2025 group.