UNC-Chapel Hill’s Kosorok elected AAAS fellow

Michael R. Kosorok, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill biostatics professor, has been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science.

With this announcement, Carolina now boasts 72 fellows among its current faculty.

Election as a fellow, a tradition that began in 1874, is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers for their efforts toward advancing science applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished.

Kosorok, W.R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor at the Gillings School of Global Public Health, was honored for his distinguished contributions to biostatistics, in survival analysis, empirical processes and semiparametric models, statistical learning theory and personalized medicine, and for extraordinary administrative service.

Kosorok has led a number of National Institutes of Health grants, including a Big Data to Knowledge in Biomedicine grant to train students from multiple disciplines to develop career-long relationships with big data. He co-leads the National Cancer Institute’s Statistical Methods for Cancer Clinical Trials to develop new methods for the design and analysis of cancer clinical trials.

Since 2006, he has become the chair of biostatistics, professor of statistics and operations research and member of the University’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. He serves as director of the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute’s biostatistics core and as research fellow at the Cecil B. Sheps Center for Health Services Research.

Among his honors are fellowship in the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and American Statistical Association and numerous invitations to give distinguished lectures throughout his career.

The AAAS will honor Kosock and 390 other fellows on Feb. 18 at the AAAS Fellows Forum during its 2017 annual meeting in Boston.