News and Highlights
June 2009
Welcome New Faculty
Leif Eric Peterson, PhD, MPH, has been appointed Associate Professor of Public Health. Dr. Peterson received his B.S. degree from Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, his M.P.H. from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and his Ph.D. from the University of Texas in Houston. Before and overlapping with the beginning of his career in academic medicine, he worked for 15 years as a fighter pilot and as a space shuttle radiation specialist. Dr. Peterson is the senior biostatistician/epidemiologist in The Methodist Hospital’s ( Houston, Texas) Research Institute. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. Previously, he held appointments in the Departments of Medicine and Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor. Dr. Peterson’s research studies have included prostate cancer, leukemia, COPD, clinical problems of astronauts, lung cancer, cardiovascular disease, and obesity. He has taught at the University of Houston and Baylor College of Medicine, and has mentored graduate students and fellows and served on doctoral candidacy and master’s thesis committees. He is also a member of The Methodist Hospital Research Institute’s Institutional Review Board.
Jaya Satagopan, PhD, has been appointed Associate Professor of Public Health in the Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology. Dr. Satagopan’s primary appointment is as Associate Attending Biostatistician at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. She earned a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Madras in Madras, India; an M.S. in Statistics from the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta; and a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Since joining MSKCC, Dr. Satagopan’s research has focused on cancer epidemiology and tumor biology. In the Department of Public Health, she contributes as an active collaborator on a number of research and educational efforts. She is a co-Investigator on a subcontract of the Research Design and Biostatistics Core of the Clinical and Translational Science Center (PI: Dr. Colin Begg), for which she will provide expert consultation on projects with a statistical genetics background. She is also a co-Principal Investigator, with Dr. Li-Xuan Qin of MSKCC and Dr. Xi Kathy Zhou of WCMC, on a pilot grant for the CTSC called “Statistical methods for improved assessment of molecular signatures.” Dr. Satagopan teaches Bayesian Statistics in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biomedicine course directed by Dr. Lucy Skrabenek for the tri-institutional graduate program. She also presents in the Public Health Department’s Biostatistics and Epidemiology research seminar series for continuing medical education credit.
