Shyamal D. Peddada, Ph.D.

As chair of Pitt Public Health’s Department of Biostatistics, Peddada leads a program internationally recognized for its research efforts and graduate student programs, particularly in emerging data science fields dealing with big biomedical data, such as genetics, genomics, mobile health, neuroimaging and electronic data collection in clinical trials, which have increased demand for trained biostatisticians. Department faculty participate in research ranging from national phase 3 clinical trials to international studies evaluating health outcomes from environmental and occupational exposures. 

Peddada’s research is at the intersection of several fields of public health, including computational biology, genomics and epidemiology. He focuses on developing statistical models that creatively use data to make public health discoveries that change how we prevent and treat a range of health conditions. 

Prior to joining Pitt Public Health in 2017, Peddada was the acting branch chief of the Biostatistics & Computational Biology Branch and senior tenured investigator at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Before that, he was a faculty member in the Department of Statistics at the University of Virginia, where he rose to become a tenured professor. He earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in statistics from the University of Pittsburgh. 

Peddada has authored or co-authored more than 75 peer-reviewed papers, collaborated on more than 60 papers and has actively served as an academic editor of the journal PLOS ONE since 2012. Previously, he served as an associate editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association and Statistics and Probability Letters. 

He is a member of the International Statistical Institute and an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association.