Dr. Alisa Stephens-Shields receives the 2024 Myrto Lefkopoulou Distinguished Lectureship!
Dr. Stephens-Shields has demonstrated her great capacity as both a methodologic and collaborative biostatistician and as a leader impacting health, statistical education, and inclusion in the field.
Dr. Stephens-Shields is currently an Associate Professor of Biostatistics at University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. She received her B.S. in Mathematics from University of Maryland and her PhD from the department of Biostatistics at Harvard University in 2012. In 2021, she assumed the role of director of the Biostatistics and Data Science Core at the Center for AIDS Research (CFAR). In this role, she expanded the Center’s research to include pediatric HIV research and furthered statistical mentorship and training programs for HIV researchers at Penn.
In addition to her own teaching and guest lecturing, Dr. Stephens-Shields co-developed a new course for Penn’s Master of Science in Clinical Epidemiology program. This class teaches causal inference methods for observational studies using approaches such as propensity-score weighting, matching, and adjustment, instrumental variables, marginal structural models to adjust for time-varying confounding, and sensitivity analyses. Dr. Stephens-Shields is also the course director for Design of Interventional Studies, a core course in Penn’s biostatistics doctoral program. She regularly leads causal inference workshops for researchers from industry and academia.
As the chair of Penn Biostatistics’ Student Recruitment Committee, Dr. Stephens-Shields has led efforts to foster diversity and to increase awareness of quantitative, health-focused careers. She is a regular facilitator at the Eastern North American Region (ENAR) Fostering Diversity Workshop and has been a frequent guest discussant at STATFest, an annual conference organized by the American Statistical Association (ASA) Committee on Minorities in Statistics. In 2021, she accepted an appointment as adjunct faculty at Harvard University, where she continues to provide career mentorship for students and junior faculty.
Dr. Stephens-Shields has demonstrated her expertise in diverse research settings. She served as the senior statistician on two large trials: the Randomized Evaluation of Trial Acceptability by Incentive (RETAIN) trial, and the Improving HPV Vaccination Delivery in Pediatric Primary Care trial (STOP-HPV). She has also served as the lead statistician for the Multidisciplinary Approach to the Study of Chronic Pelvic Pain (MAPP), where she contributed to the development of key outcome measures and led the MAPP investigative team in summarizing over a decade of research into empirically informed considerations for the design of future clinical trials in chronic pelvic pain.
Through her leadership in statistical methods development and application, in her engaged teaching, and in creating a more diverse community of statisticians, Dr. Alisa Stephens-Shields truly represents the essence of the award which honors the legacy of Dr. Myrto Lefkopoulou.
We look forward to honoring her and continuing to follow her outstanding career.
