What is Biostatistics?

Biostatistics is the branch of statistics responsible for the proper interpretation of scientific data generated in the biology, public health and other health sciences (i.e., the biomedical sciences). In these sciences, subjects (patients, mice, cells, etc.) exhibit considerable variation in their response to stimuli. This variation may be due to different treatments or it may be due to chance, measurement error, or other characteristics of the individual subjects. Biostatistics is particularly concerned with disentangling these different sources of variation. It seeks to distinguish between correlation and causation, and to make valid inferences from known samples about the populations from which they were drawn. (For example, do the results of treating patients with two therapies justify the conclusion that one treatment is better than the other?) Biostatisticians regularly engage in interdisciplinary collaborations and advance their discipline through pursuit of methodological development of statistical methods for biomedical applications. Biostatistics is a broad discipline encompassing the application of statistical theory to real-world problems, the practice of designing and conducting biomedical experiments and clinical trials (experiments with human subjects), the study of related computational algorithms and display of data, and the development of mathematical statistical theory. Biostatistics is integral to the advance of knowledge in biology, health policy, clinical medicine, public health policy, health economics, proteomics, genomics, and other disciplines. At Vanderbilt, biostatisticians facilitate biomedical research by providing methodological expertise and by closely collaborating with scientists and physician researchers.