What if your quantitative skills could help improve people's lives?

That's where BIOSTATISTICS and HEALTH DATA SCIENCE 
turn quantitative reasoning into health impact.

Hello Kyle,

Your academic coursework is preparing you to reason precisely, recognize structure, and approach difficult problems systematically.

Biostatistics and health data science are where mathematical theory meets scientific application.

At Michigan Biostatistics, graduate study can prepare you to apply your mathematical strengths to real challenges affecting patients and communities while deepening your knowledge of probability, inference, modeling, and computation.

In biostatistics and health data science, researchers develop models, design studies, quantify uncertainty, and evaluate the evidence behind decisions in medicine and public health. They use quantitative methods to determine whether treatments work, identify factors associated with disease, model health outcomes, and strengthen the evidence behind health interventions.

Their work spans nearly every form of modern health data. Biostatisticians analyze electronic health records to uncover patterns in care and outcomes, study genomic data to identify factors associated with disease, use medical images to improve detection and diagnosis of cancer, and integrate information across clinical studies and entire populations. They also adapt machine-learning methods for healthcare—evaluating whether algorithms are accurate, reproducible, interpretable, fair, and appropriate for the decisions they may influence.

That work might include:

Designing an efficient and informative clinical trial

Modeling the progression or spread of disease

Providing a statistically sound foundation for emerging biomedical technologies

Quantifying uncertainty in a large genetic study

Developing new statistical methods for complex biomedical data

Strengthening the evidence behind health policies and interventions

At the University of Michigan, you can pursue this work through three distinct graduate pathways:

• MS in Biostatistics, combining rigorous statistical training with applied health research
• MS in Health Data Science, with its strong computational and machine-learning focus
• PhD in Biostatistics, preparing students to develop new methods and lead original research.

If you want your quantitative abilities to do more than describe the world— if you want them to help improve it — there may be a place for you at Michigan Biostatistics.