Lisa Dierker is an epidemiologist whose research focuses on the application of state-of-the-art statistical methods in understanding the development of addictive behaviors. Through funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), she has been employing promising, new statistical methods with the goal of informing the content and timing of targeted interventions for addictive behavior. Her scholarly productivity has included more than 100 peer reviewed articles and over $5,000,000 in grants advancing the fields of addiction, health and training in quantitative science. 

With funding through NSF, She has developed a passion-driven, project-based, multidisciplinary curriculum aimed at overcoming many of the very real challenges in engaging students in the rich, complicated, decision-making process of real inquiry with data (passiondrivenstatistics.com). In its pilot at Wesleyan University, the curriculum has changed the relationship that many students have with data. The course has been shown to attract higher rates of underrepresented students than a traditional statistics course, and student feedback from the course has been quite positive, with the majority reporting that it has been one of the most useful courses they have taken in college and that it has increased their interest in pursuing additional coursework in data analysis.

The model has been implemented successfully in other high schools, colleges, and universities, and has also been adapted to reach a worldwide audience as a Massive Open Online series of courses available through Coursera (for more information, see https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-analysis).

Through QUBES, I look forward to thinking about the data-driven opportunities that biology data presents and to meeting other faculty who are also interested in bringing real world data into the classroom.