Nilanjan Chatterjee Departs from NCI
, by DCEG Staff
Nilanjan Chatterjee
Nilanjan Chatterjee, Ph.D., departed in September 2015 from the Biostatistics Branch (BB) after 16 years with NCI. In his new position he will serve as a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins University with joint appointments at the Bloomberg School of Public Health (Biostatistics) and the School of Medicine (Oncology).
Dr. Chatterjee served as Chief of BB for almost eight years, providing leadership that inspired outstanding scientific accomplishments and a vibrant intellectual environment. He recruited tenure-track investigators and trainees with expertise in various cutting-edge areas, including genetics, genomics, and precision medicine.
“We are pleased to keep Nilanjan as a volunteer with DCEG, but his day to day efforts and insight will be greatly missed,” said Stephen J. Chanock, M.D., DCEG Director. “Our continued collaboration with Nilanjan will strengthen our already robust connection with Johns Hopkins.”
At NCI, Dr. Chatterjee’s research focused on a diverse set of quantitative issues that arise in design, analysis, interpretation and public health translation of modern molecular and genetic epidemiologic studies. He is well-known for his groundbreaking research into increasing the efficiency of gene-environment and gene-gene interaction studies, assessing the future yield of modern genome-wide association studies (GWAS), and modeling subtype heterogeneity for complex diseases. He has made fundamental contributions to the analysis of case-control studies by developing new paradigms that exploit natural population genetic models for studies of genetic epidemiology. Dr. Chatterjee’s research is grounded in both modern and classical aspects of statistics, including theory of biased sampling, missing data models, semiparametric inference, survival analysis, and shrinkage estimation techniques. He also collaborates on a variety of epidemiologic studies, including recent GWAS that have contributed to a better understanding of the genetic basis of a variety of cancers.
In 2011, Dr. Chatterjee was awarded the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies Presidents' Award. Jointly sponsored by five major statistical societies, this award is generally recognized as the most prestigious award worldwide for early-career statisticians. Dr. Chatterjee was the first recipient outside of academia in the three decades that the award has been given.
Dr. Chatterjee is the recipient of numerous other national and international awards, including the Mortimer Spiegelman Award (2010) for outstanding contribution to public health statistics, and the Snedecor Award (2011) for significant contribution to theory of biometry. He is elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association (2008) and an elected member of the American Epidemiologic Society (2012).