One of the memorable things for Thomas Dolan about his pursuit of a Master of Science degree in Biostatistics is how passionate the faculty members are. “Their passion for biostats stands out, and it really showed in their coursework and even in conversations about their field,” he says.
That was an important aspect of his experience with the program offered at the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, as was the considerable support from faculty members who are biostatisticians who partnered with students on their capstone projects. For his capstone project, Mr. Dolan compared changes in the genetic expression in older and younger individuals after receiving the influenza vaccine. He found that younger people had more distinct changes. Although there is still much to be learned about how the immune system functions, his findings aligned with the notion that as people age, they tend to have greater inflammation, which often results in an immune system that is not as responsive as it is in younger people.
“We actually worked with real data on actual projects,” Mr. Dolan says. “The great thing about Mount Sinai is that students have access to all these unique resources.” These include the Center for Biostatistics, the Biomedical Data Science Initiative, the International Center for Health Outcomes and Innovation Research, the Institute for Health Care Delivery Science, the Institute for Health Equity Research, and the Institute for Translational Epidemiology.
His own growing passion for biostatistics and the skills he learned and refined at Mount Sinai have led him to a position as a research analyst for the United Network for Organ Sharing, the nonprofit, scientific, and educational organization that administers the only organ procurement and transplantation network in the United States, where he will be analyzing survival statistics among organ recipients. “The most exciting thing for me is that this new job is another opportunity to keep learning, and it’s going to be really interesting,” Mr. Dolan says.