Robert T. Krafty Named Chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics

After a large, national search, Robert T. Krafty, PhD, will join the Rollins School of Public Health on September 1, 2020, as the Chair and Rollins Professor of the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics. Krafty is nationally recognized in the field of biostatistics and brings to Rollins great enthusiasm and vision for the future of the department and the school. 

Krafty joins Rollins from the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health, where he is a tenured faculty member and chair of the biostatistics curriculum. Previously, he was an assistant professor of statistics at Temple University. He holds a master’s in mathematics and a PhD in biostatistics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Krafty currently leads a federally funded transdisciplinary research group at the University of Pittsburgh that develops and applies methodologies for learning and conducting inference on high-dimensional time series and functional data to elucidate biological mechanisms underlying behavioral health. Examples of his group’s work include the development and application of methods and software for using data from wearable and mobile devices for monitoring and treating depression in older adults and using EEG and ECG data collected during sleep to understand how treatments of poor sleep can be used to improve women’s health.

His teaching and research have earned him multiple honors and recognitions, including the 2016 Philips Grand Challenge Award (University of Pittsburgh), the award for High Achievement in Sponsored Projects (Temple University), and University of Pennsylvania’s Award for Outstanding Teaching. He is actively engaged with a number of scientific and research organizations, and currently serves as the associate editor of both The American Statistician and Statistics and Its Interface and is on the editorial board of Sleep.