Ronald Brookmeyer

Ronald S. Brookmeyer (born September 4, 1954) is an American public health researcher and biostatistician. He is Distinguished Professor of Biostatistics at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. He served as seventh dean of the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health (interim dean, 2018-2020; dean, 2020-2026). He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. He serves on the Statistics Board of the Reviewing Editors of Science Magazine.

Early life and education Brookmeyer was born on September 4, 1954, in New York, US. He completed his Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from Cooper Union in 1975. He then completed his Master of Science (MSc) and Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degrees in statistics from the University of Wisconsin in 1977 and 1980, respectively. During his time at Cooper Union, he developed a mathematical model of the parasite-host relationship on the population growth of schistosomiasis.

Career Brookmeyer joined the faculty at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health in 1981 as an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics. During this period, Brookmeyer created tools and models using statistical, informational, and mathematical sciences to address and quantify the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In 1992, he was awarded the Mortimer Spiegelman gold medal by the American Public Health Association for contributions to health statistics. Brookmeyer also taught workshops on biostatistics in China at the request of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control, becoming one of the first U.S. biostatisticians teaching biostatistics in China in 1985. He also served on the editorial board of the journal Statistics in Medicine from 1985 to 1994.

Brookmeyer developed models to assess the magnitude of the anthrax attacks following 9/11 and to rapidly address biosecurity and bioterrorism emergencies in the future. In 2007, Brookmeyer was elected a member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly referred to as the Institute of Medicine).

In 2010 he joined the faculty at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.

Brookmeyer was awarded the President's Citation from Cooper Union in 2010 "for the development of new statistical methods and models for tracking the spread and consequences of disease." He was appointed to the Statistical Board of Reviewing Editors for Science Magazine in 2014. In the same year, Brookmeyer was named the 2014 Norman Breslow Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Washington, having previously been the Lester Breslow Distinguished lecturer at UCLA in 2012. In 2015, Brookmeyer received the Nathan Mantel Lifetime Achievement Award from American Statistical Association's Section on Statistics in Epidemiology for his "valuable lifetime contributions at the intersection of statistical science and epidemiology."

In 2018, Brookmeyer was named Interim Dean and in 2020 named Dean of the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he advocated for the development of a new approach to clinical trials conducted during pandemics. In the co-authored paper, the researchers suggested a "core-protocol concept" to clinical trials, which could be applied across infectious disease outbreaks and allow for the addition of new team members over time.

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