Fifteen of the top 25 fastest growing industries are health care related. As we reported in our blog of January 22, Glassdoor ranked Data Scientist as the best job in America for 2016. How to marry the two? Consider a career in Biostatistics.
The marrying of big data and the ability to use technology to analyze it is making every industry more efficient and productive. Healthcare moves beyond using big data for business issues like improving profits and cutting waste to predicting epidemics, curing disease, improving the quality of life and avoiding preventable deaths. If the ability to have this sort of impact excites you a PhD in Biostatistics can open doors beyond clinical trials to projects in genetics, genomics, computational biology, electronic medical records, neuroscience, environmental sciences, epidemiology and health risk analysis.
Fortune Magazine and Payscale reported that a doctorate in statistics leads to a career with lower stress and yet is still #1 in the top ten list of best graduate degrees. In fact a PhD in Statistics is #1, a Master’s in Biostatistics is #2, a Master’s in Applied Math is #8 and a Master’s in Statistics is #9. Savvy undergraduates starting to recognize this opportunity are putting pressure on the existing graduate schools. Only 21 schools granted at least one PhD in Biostatistics in the past five years. A list of those schools is shown below. This is significantly less than the 78 schools that grant advanced degrees in statistics.
Interested in knowing more? Nihar Parikh @ nparikh@smithhanley.com, Biostatistics Executive Recruiting at Smith Hanley Associates, would be happy to discuss career paths and hiring outlooks in this hot specialization.
Universities with Biostatistics PhD programs: Harvard, University of Washington, North Carolina, Michigan, Berkeley, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, UCLA, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Emory, Boston University, University of Texas Health Sciences Center, Medical College of Wisconsin, Medical University of South Carolina, Virginia Commonwealth University and Tulane.
