The University of Washington Department of Biostatistics begins the 2025-26 academic year under new leadership, welcoming Professor Ali Shojaie as interim department chair and Professor Marco Carone as interim associate chair. Both assumed their duties on July 1, 2025.
Ali Shojaie, Interim Department Chair
Shojaie shared that his focus will be on preserving and expanding the department’s long-standing tradition of excellence and rigor in education and scholarship. He aims to work closely with—and empower—faculty, students, staff, and other partners to address pressing challenges in public health and medicine by harnessing the growing availability of data, advances in statistical theory, and rapid developments in computing.
Shojaie has been a member of the School of Public Health faculty since 2011 and previously served as the department’s associate chair for strategic research affairs from 2020 to 2025. He is the founding director of the Summer Institute for Statistics in Big Data (SISBID) and leads the Data Management and Statistics (DMS) Core of the UW Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC).
“UW Biostatistics has an outstanding history of leadership in education and scholarship, and I am honored to be serving as the department's interim chair,” said Shojaie.
“The expanding availability of data and advances in computing create unprecedented opportunities for biomedical scientists and (bio)statisticians to address critical challenges in public health and medicine. I look forward to collaborating with department members and partners to advance this mission.”
Shojaie’s research lies at the intersection of statistical machine learning, statistical network analysis and applications in biology and social sciences. He is an elected fellow of both the American Statistical Association (ASA) and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), and he received the 2022 Leo Breiman Award from the ASA Section on Statistical Learning and Data Science (SLDS).
“I would like to thank the previous chairs, and especially Dr. Lurdes Inoue for her leadership over the past six years. I would also like to thank Dr. Marco Carone for accepting the role of associate chair,” said Shojaie.
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Marco Carone, Interim Associate Department Chair
As interim associate chair, Carone will work closely with Shojaie to help shape the department’s research and educational priorities. His charge includes fostering methodological and collaborative research opportunities and strengthening the department’s research infrastructure by building connections with investigators in the department, across campus, and throughout a range of external organizations. He is also deeply committed to ensuring that the department’s academic programs remain world-leading, with a continued emphasis on rigor, depth, and innovation.
“So much of the history of biostatistics has been written in this department, and our collective work continues to shape the future of the field and of public health more broadly. I am honored to support Dr. Ali Shojaie as he leads the department forward—ensuring it continues to thrive and serve as a beacon in the health sciences, even amid ongoing and serious challenges,” said Carone.
Carone joined UW in 2014 and received the School of Public Health’s Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award in 2018. Most recently, he was selected to receive the prestigious Myrto Lefkopoulou Distinguished Lectureship from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is also an affiliate investigator in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center.
Carone’s research focuses on causal inference, survival analysis, and the integration of machine learning into statistical inference. He collaborates closely with researchers in infectious diseases—particularly on vaccine evaluation and respiratory virus epidemiology—as well as in neurology, with an emphasis on dementia research.
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