Faculty member profile featured in the in February 2024 issue of the department’s equity, diversity, and inclusion newsletter. 

Tell us about yourself including your nationality, ethnicity, and culture.

My cultural background is a bit complicated! I was born in Montreal, Canada, to immigrant parents. My dad came from Italy. My mom is from Egypt though her parents were Armenians who had to flee the Ottoman Empire during or in the immediate aftermath of the Armenian Genocide and found refuge in Egypt.

While my first language is French, growing up, conversations at home would often involve a mix of French, English, Italian and Armenian. I lived in my hometown until going to grad school in Baltimore in 2005, and I’ve been in the US ever since. My wife’s parents are also immigrants from Italy, so we are raising our two daughters in Seattle mostly in an Italian cultural home environment — this has resulted in a slightly bizarre situation, where my oldest daughter is much more comfortable in Italian than in English, even though she was born and raised in Seattle.

How did you come to be associated with the UW Department of Biostatistics?

I first visited UW Biostatistics as a prospective PhD student and remember having a great time during my visit. It was my first time in Seattle (in fact, on the West Coast) and I still remember how mesmerized I was by the landscape and the gloomy Winter sky. I ended up going elsewhere for grad school because, at the time, I wanted to stay close to home.

Many years later, in 2013, while finishing a postdoc at Berkeley, I applied to UW Biostatistics for a faculty position and was invited for an interview. It was a whirlwind visit on Valentine’s Day, and my wife even flew in from Montreal so we could see each other. We had an amazing dinner at Canlis, with an incredible view of Lake Union — it may well have contributed to both of us falling in love with Seattle — and the rest is history, as they say.

I have to admit that I never envisioned, even in my wildest dreams, that I could one day become faculty at one of the very best departments in the world, and to have as colleagues some of the (bio)statistical legends (e.g., Prentice, Breslow, Wellner, Fleming) who I had learned about in my undergraduate and graduate training.

Tell us something we’d be surprised to know about you?

Up until grad school, I was really into tennis. (Don’t make the same mistake I made — keep up with the hobbies you love even despite the demands of grad school!!) Throughout high school and college, in the summer, I’d be on the tennis courts every day. For many years, I served as technical expert in a large pro shop and had a racquet stringing business with a friend. I read every single article I could find on the latest racquet and string models and technologies.

Perhaps the pinnacle of my “career” as a tennis tech was serving as stringer for the Canadian Junior Open and stringing Jo-Wilfried Tsonga’s racquet, when he was just on the verge of breaking onto the pro scene. (Tsonga was a force to reckon with on the court, and he reached #5 world ranking in 2012.)

On a completely unrelated note, and perhaps not surprisingly given my background, one of the things I enjoy the most is learning languages and about other cultures. I am convinced that the depth of the connections you can make with others when you speak — or at least attempt to speak — their native tongue is unparalleled. The languages (including scripts) I have studied so far include Dutch, Arabic, Persian and Hebrew. I am not yet conversational in any of these languages though so there is much more for me to learn, if only I had the time to do so...

What motivates you?

In my work, I am most motivated by projects that can make a real difference, though what kind of difference that is can vary greatly. On one hand, this might mean making a proximal difference to a particular scientific problem by directly assisting a scientific project, either through getting involved in a data analysis or developing methods tailored to this problem. In the past many years, for me, that has meant working on vaccine science and infectious diseases — if it was ever in doubt, the critical importance of these topics should now be clear to everyone!

On the other hand, it might mean making a more distal difference by coming up with a general framework or template that can be used by other methodologists to develop novel statistical tools in a variety of contexts. This sometimes involves theoretical work. While I likely do enjoy or care for theory more than the average biostatistician, I don’t typically do theory just for the sake of it or simply for its sheer beauty (though it can be quite beautiful). Rather, I do it if I believe it can inform practice. Beyond this, I am also a real stickler for precision, both in content and form, which drives my students crazy at times. But I am convinced that it results in better papers, better science in the end.

Who/what has inspired you the most and why?

That’s a difficult question to answer. So many have inspired and continue to inspire me, including my colleagues in Biostatistics, Statistics, and other fields of Public Health and Medicine. 

I guess I’d be remiss not to mention one in particular, though. I was fortunate to interact with Norm Breslow when I arrived at UW. At the time, he was already retired and dealing with serious health issues. Nevertheless, when I advertised a special topics course I was able to teach early on, he reached out and asked if he could attend. Norm attended most lectures and took assiduous notes. Of course, before coming to UW, I knew of Norm’s many foundational contributions and of his lifelong dedication to rigorous and impactful science. But I hadn’t realized how humble he also was — despite all he had achieved, he acknowledged that there was always so much more to learn from others and he actively sought that, even through declining health. I found that immensely inspiring.

The last time I saw Norm, he had stopped by my office, and we had a nice chat. Before leaving, I distinctly remember him telling me that he and others in the older generations had done their part to bring UW Biostatistics to the top of the heap, and that it was now in the hands of my generation to keep it up there. Those were Norm’s parting words to me, and I often replay that exchange in my mind. They have strengthened my conviction that we are much more than individual researchers, that we are part of a meaningful collective, and that we are responsible for the stewardship of something much bigger than each of us, something that has made a major difference in the history of the field and public health more broadly, and that has so much more to contribute to the world. In view of the interactions I had with Norm, it has been particularly meaningful to me to have been the inaugural Norm Breslow Distinguished Faculty Fellow in the department.

What three words would you use to describe yourself?

Some people may say that I am 'at times over-the-top’ — can that be counted as three words? I am a bit of an extremist in most things I do, which turns out to be simultaneously good and bad.

Read more about Marco Carone