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CUNY SPH is delighted to announce that, effective September 1, Drs. Levi Waldron and Constantin Yiannoutsos have been elevated to the rank of distinguished professor. Both appointments were approved by the CUNY Board of Trustees at its meeting on June 29.
CUNY bestows the title of distinguished professor on faculty who have built international reputations as leaders within their fields and have been consistent producers of innovative and influential research. Drs. Waldron and Yiannoutsos are each eminent scholars in their respective fields.
Dr. Levi Waldron is a founding faculty member of CUNY SPH, joining the school from the Hunter College School of Urban Public Health. His research advances public health through the development of statistical and computational methods that reduce barriers to the analysis and reanalysis of high-throughput genomic and metagenomic data. As an early leader in the open science movement, his work has helped establish computational resources that have accelerated research in cancer, microbiome science, and other areas of public health and biomedicine.
With more than $10 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health and private foundations, Dr. Waldron has built a research program with broad scientific impact. Software developed under his leadership forms core components of the Bioconductor project, the leading open-source software ecosystem for Bioinformatics, providing widely used tools that support researchers across a broad range of scientific disciplines. Through these contributions, he has advanced the use of publicly available data to address important questions in public health while fostering a more collaborative, transparent, and accessible scientific research environment.
Prior to joining CUNY SPH, Dr. Yiannoutsos spent almost a decade at Harvard University running clinical trials dealing with neurological sequelae of HIV infection. He then spent over 20 years at Indiana University (IU) where he held a number of positions including director of the IU Cancer Center Biostatistics Facility and director of graduate education.
Dr. Yiannoutsos’ methodological research is focused on statistical issues in survival analysis and causal methods, particularly addressing biases resulting from missing data in the context of observational studies. He runs a large epidemiological cohort which has been following over 500,000 persons living with HIV/AIDS in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania for decades, as part of the IeDEA (www.iedea.org) Collaboration, a worldwide network of HIV care and treatment programs following over 2,000,000 people worldwide. In this capacity, he has provided data and statistical expertise to aid governments, foundations, and international organizations in evidence-based health policy and decision-making with respect to the response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Professor Yiannoutsos has used his expertise with large international HIV/AIDS cohorts to address similar issues domestically, most recently in a study of people living with HIV/AIDS in the state of Indiana. During the COVID epidemic, he was instrumental in using statistical methods to aid in Indiana’s epidemic response. Dr. Yiannoutsos is a passionate teacher who has taught, trained, and mentored hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students around the world and has developed statistics education and training curricula at all levels.
“We are honored that the university has bestowed this special recognition on two of our senior faculty, and we are grateful to the Board of Trustees for supporting the school’s nominations,” says CUNY SPH Dean Ayman El-Mohandes. “We are confident that this is just the beginning of even greater achievements as they move into the next chapter of their careers.”
Drs. Waldron and Yiannoutsos join an eminent group of distinguished professors at CUNY SPH including Drs. Luisa N. Borrell, Nicholas Freudenberg, Renee Goodwin, Christian Grov, Terry Huang, Denis Nash, and Mary Schooling.
