Donna Spiegelman, ScD

Donna Spiegelman, ScD

Professor, Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Senior Biostatistician, Channing Division of Network Medicine, Department of Medicine, Brigham & Women’s Hospital; Adjunct Associate Professor, Biostatistics and Epidemiology, Tufts University School of Medicine

Donna Spiegelman is one of the few people in the world with a joint doctorate in Biostatistics and Epidemiology. As a result, she can freely speak the languages of both disciplines, and switch between the two cultures, playing the role of interlocutor for either. She is the statistician for the Nurses’ Health Study 2, the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, the Pooling Project of Prospective Studies of Diet and Cancer in Men and Women, the Harvard PEPFAR Dar es Salaam site, Trials of Vitamins in Dar es Salaam, and the multitude of projects spawned by these efforts. Her research is motivated by problems which arise in epidemiology and require biostatistical solutions. Dr. Spiegelman’s website is one of the most visited at the  Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH), because it contains much user-friendly well-documented freeware implementing non-standard methods useful in epidemiologic research. Dr. Spiegelman’s most recent interest has been to work with various departments in an interdisciplinary effort to greatly increase global public health efforts at HSPH. In particular, Dr. Spiegelman is interested in developing, testing, and implementing preventive interventions to abate global cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease epidemics and offers her expertise in monitoring and evaluation to this end. Dr. Spiegelman and her doctoral student collaborate with BetterBirth through examining the use of pilot data to understand programmatic changes and “learning-by-doing” models of implementation science.