Director
of graduate programs named
by Kim Miller
Dr. Stephen W. Looney, a former biostatistics program director and professor at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center School of Public Health in New Orleans, has joined MCG as a professor of biostatistics and director of graduate programs.
Dr. Looney will direct the new master’s program in biostatistics and develop a doctoral program within the next few years.
The Department of Biostatistics, formerly the Office of Biostatistics, became an academic department in the School of Graduate Studies in 2004. The office previously functioned as a statistical consulting center for clients. This is the first year MCG has offered a degree in biostatistics.
“Biostatistics is focused specifically on applications in the life sciences which include human subjects, our focus at MCG, as well as laboratory animals and agricultural samples,” Dr. Looney explained. “A biostatistician’s job is to help investigators design research studies and advise them on the best way to collect and analyze the data.”
Dr. Looney jump-started a dormant biostatistics program at LSU Health Sciences Center. He created and served as acting director of the biostatistics-decision science program at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, where he was a professor of family and community medicine and biostatistician. He was a senior research fellow in epidemiology and visiting professor of mathematics at Keele University in Staffordshire, England. He began his academic career as an assistant professor of quantitative business analysis at LSU and became director of the master of business administration program in 1989.
Dr. Looney received a Distinguished Achievement Award in 2005 from the Section on Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences from the American Statistical Association and an Outstanding Teaching Award in the Clinical Research, Epidemiology and Statistics Training Program at the University of Louisville in 2003. He received the Best Invited Paper Award from the Section on Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Indianapolis in 2000.
His research interests include multivariate statistical analysis, a collection of procedures involving observation and analysis of more than one statistical variable at a time, analysis of clustered and correlated data, statistical applications in the health sciences and statistics education.