ACE Abraham Lilienfeld Award

Steven N. Goodman, M.D., M.H.S., Ph.D., Associate Dean for Clinical and Translational Research, Professor of Medicine and Health Research and Policy, and chief of the Division of Epidemiology received the 2019 Abraham Lilienfeld Award from the American College of Epidemiology (ACE), epidemiology’s primary professional organization. This award is the ACE’s most prestigious recognition and is given in honor of Abraham Lilienfeld, a pioneer in epidemiology, renowned teacher, and founder of the College. Recipients of this award are senior leaders who have made extraordinary contributions to the field of epidemiology over the course of their careers, through research, scholarship, teaching and mentoring. Dr. Goodman received this award at ACE’s annual meeting on September 9th in Pasadena, CA, where he was also recognized as a lifetime Honorary Fellow of the College.

ACE gave the award in recognition of Dr. Goodman’s work that has “greatly expanded the understanding of scientific and statistical inference, resulting in a deeper ability to share data and confirm and extend published science.”  He is a highly productive researcher having published hundreds of papers in the peer-reviewed literature, appearing in Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine,  Science and Nature. He continues to be recognized as one of the leaders in the field, developing innovative approaches to critical scientific issues that deal with the representation and measurement of evidence in epidemiologic research.

ACE noted that addition to his scholarship, Dr. Goodman has maintained an active role in directing graduate programs and mentoring graduate students throughout his career. From 1989-2011, he served on the faculties of the Johns Hopkins Schools of Medicine and Public Health, where he was co-director of the doctoral program in Epidemiology and developed curricula and new models of teaching the foundations of epidemiology. He was a member (1989-2011) and then director (2007-2011) of the Johns Hopkins cancer center’s Division of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics. At Stanford, he has directed the Division of Epidemiology since 2013, and will be the Director of Graduate Studies when it becomes the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health on Oct. 1.  He is co-founder and co-director of the Meta-research Innovation Center at Stanford, focusing on improving the reliability and reproducibility of published biomedical science.

ACE noted that Dr. Goodman generously gives his time in service to the broader scientific community. He has been a senior statistical editor of Annals of Internal Medicine since 1987 and was editor in chief of Clinical Trials: Journal of the Society for Clinical Trials from 2004-2013. He is chair of the Methodology Committee of the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), leading their methods standards, open science and data sharing efforts, and is scientific advisor for the national Blue Cross–Blue Shield Technology Assessment Program. He has served on National Academy of Sciences committees almost continually since the mid 1990's, including co-chairing a 2012 committee on drug safety, and as a committee member on sharing data from clinical trials, whose report was released in January, 2015. He was awarded the 2016 Spinoza Chair in Medicine from the University of Amsterdam for his work in scientific and statistical inference.