Congratulations to Dr. Rameela Chandrasekhar Raman on her promotion to full professor of biostatistics, health policy, and psychiatry & behavioral sciences at Vanderbilt University, effective December 1. Dr. Raman earned her PhD in biostatistics from State University of New York at Buffalo, joining the Vanderbilt faculty as an instructor in 2011, with promotions to assistant professor in 2013 and associate professor in 2019. She has taught full-semester courses in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and School of Nursing as well.
Inducted into Vanderbilt University School of Medicine's Academy for Excellence in Education in 2019, Dr. Raman was also named Outstanding Faculty Mentor by the biostatistics student body that year, and recognized with the Golden Apple Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2024. She has received glowing reviews as a mentor of students and junior investigators in other fields, including epidemiology, pulmonary and critical care medicine, infectious diseases, and surgery, and is a national leader in statistical education, particularly in the areas of ethics and collaborative statistics.
An outstanding researcher and team scientist, Dr. Raman has excelled for more than a decade in her roles as lead statistician for the CDC-sponsored Emerging Infections Program and biostatistics core director for the Critical Illness, Brain Dysfunction, and Survivorship (CIBS) Center. Her exceptional leadership on the topic of child welfare has resulted in data-driven improvements in the well-being of children and families and was recognized in 2025 with the American Statistical Association's Statistical Partnerships Among Academe, Industry, and Government Award. Dr. Raman is the author of more than 100 peer-reviewed papers (many listed in her School of Medicine profile), including at least 5 publications first-authored by Vanderbilt biostatistics students. A testimonial by one of those students, Jamie Joseph (PhD 2024; now on the biostatistics faculty of Henry Ford Health), appeared in a 2023 issue of AmStatNews.
Dr. Raman's service to the department and the wider community is likewise phenomenal: she has chaired numerous department events and committees, served on Vanderbilt's Institutional Review Board, contributed her expertise to more than 20 funding review panels, and participated on multiple data and safety monitoring boards. Her ASA involvement has included serving as Council of Chapters representative for Middle Tennessee and taking part in activities hosted by the Record Linkage Interest Group, Government Statistics Section, Health Policy Statistics Section, Section on Statistics in Epidemiology, Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology Geospatial Interest Group, the K-12 Statistics Project Competition, and the ASA Statistical Mentoring Program.
We are tremendously proud of Dr. Raman, and we very much look forward to celebrating her and her trainees' future achievements!