Dr. Lisa Sullivan is the Associate Dean for Education at the School of Public Health, Professor and former chair of the Department of Biostatistics. She has received numerous awards for Excellence in Teaching including Boston University’s prestigious Metcalf Award and the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH)/Pfizer Award for Teaching Excellence. She received the Massachusetts ACE National Network of Women Leaders Leadership Award, and the Mosteller Statistician of the Year Award from the Boston Chapter of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and is a fellow of the ASA. She was the Principal Investigator of the Summer Institute for Training in Biostatistics from 2003 to 2015, aimed at fostering interest in biostatistics careers, and she has published several textbooks, Essentials of Biostatistics for Public Health (currently in its 4th edition), Introductory Applied Biostatistics, Biostatistics for Population Health, and Public Health: An Introduction to the Science and Practice of Population Health (currently in its 2nd edition). She also co-edited a book entitled Teaching Public Health which includes a series of papers on state-of-the-science pedagogy in academic public health, designed to support faculty and academic leaders in public health, and Teaching Public Health, Volume 2, is due out in 2026. She has also engaged in exciting and impactful research projects, including clinical trials evaluating novel treatments for children with autism, the largest ever prospective cohort study to assess the effect of alcohol consumption in pregnancy and sudden infant death syndrome, and the Framingham Heart Study where she worked as senior biostatistician on numerous interdisciplinary teams on the development and dissemination of risk prediction functions. Most recently, she served as Chair of the ASPPH Framing the Future: Public Health Education 2030 initiative to envision transformative changes in public health education. As part of the same initiative, she also co-chaired the ASPPH Inclusive Excellence through an Anti-Racism Lens Expert Panel that developed recommendations and strategies to address long-standing practices of exclusion and marginalization.
Dr. Sulivan holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of New Hampshire, and master’s and doctor of philosophy degrees in mathematics/statistics from Boston University.