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Timothy Thornton appointed Biostatistics graduate program director

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Timothy Thornton
Timothy Thornton

Timothy Thornton, an associate professor of biostatistics at the University of Washington, has been named the next Biostatistics Graduate Program Director.

He succeeds Lurdes Inoue, professor and department chair of biostatistics, who served as director from July 2017 to September 2019, and was recently appointed department chair.

“Tim Thornton has shown to be fully committed to undergraduates and graduate students,“ said Inoue.

“Besides regularly teaching in our department, he has also taught a number of short courses at the Summer Institutes and also internationally.

He is a core faculty instructor for the Summer Health Profession Education Program teaching underrepresented minority college students from across the country. Tim also served as a facilitator for the Graduate Opportunities and Minority Achievement Program (GO-MAP). Tim has supervised or co-supervised a number of PhD and MS students. He is also the director of the Statistical Genetics Training Grant.

With all of these credentials, his commitment to teaching and mentoring, I am excited that Tim accepted to take on this new leadership role in the department as our new Graduate Program Director,” said Inoue.

Thornton has a BS in Mathematics from Hampton University, and a PhD in Statistics from the University of Chicago.  Before joining the faculty at the University of Washington, he was a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Statistics at UC Berkeley.  He is the recipient of the Robert W. Day Endowed Professorship and a Career Development Award from the National Cancer Institute.

“I am absolutely thrilled to be the next Graduate Program Director of the Department of Biostatistics,” said Thornton. “UW Biostatistics consistently ranks as the top biostatistics program in the United States, and this is largely due to our excellent students and outstanding faculty who are dedicated to the graduate program.

I can say, without any reservations, that my greatest joy and fulfillment over the past ten years as a biostatistics faculty member has been teaching, training, and mentoring graduate students.  As the new program director, I am looking forward to working closely with all of our graduate students, and helping to facilitate important changes to the graduate program to ensure that we continue to thrive in this new era of biomedical science.”

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