Recai Yucel, professor and director of the Biostatistics Core in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, has been selected as a fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA), a designation offered to just one-third of one percent of the association’s membership each year. The ASA recognizes Fellows for outstanding contributions to statistical science via research, teaching, and service.   

Yucel has helped develop courses and degree programs at Temple, including the MS in public health data science. He heads the college’s Incomplete Data Methods Lab and has pioneered methodologies enabling health researchers to draw statistically efficient inferences in their studies when the data gathered may be incomplete.  

“Recai’s methodological and collaborative research is highly relevant to health-related studies, which often have incomplete data,” says Resa M. Jones, chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. “In addition, our students are very fortunate to learn from a leader in the field of missing data and measurement error, so they can better understand issues with real-world data.”  

Biostatisticians often are enlisted as key members of research teams when investigators are looking to quantify public health outcomes, measure the effects of treatments, or illuminate hidden trends.  

“We try to uncover patterns that are not visible to the naked eye,” Yucel explains. Working with public health researchers, he says “they know what they want to ask, but they don't always know how they should be asking it statistically. The job is to kind of translate the subject-matter question into a statistical question, then help them design the study with respect to statistical details such as the size of the study and analytical plans that serve best to the study objectives. And then objectively analyze the data, and address the typical analytical challenges studies may have, due to missing data, due to other things that happen in life.”