Department of Medical Statistics
History & Introduction
Department Medical Statistics started from the Department of Health Statistics, which was established in 1976 with Professor Mengxuan Hu as the director. In 1981, it became one of the first master's programs in China; and in 1985, it became one of the four pioneer doctoral programs in health statistics in China. In 2002, the former Department of Health Statistics and the former Department of Epidemiology merged to form the Department of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology, which was then combined with the former Department of Mathematics of the School of Basic Medical Science in May 2004. The current Department of Medical Statistics was established in April 2019. There are two research centers affiliated to the Department, the Center of Health Policy Study for Migrants (CHPSM) founded in 2009, and the Sun Yat-sen Global Health Institute (SGHI) in 2015.
Staff
The Department has the Nationally Renowned Teacher (Jichan Fang) and Provincially Renowned Teacher (Yuantao Hao), with talented young generations. Out of total 22 staff, we have 4 professors, 7 associate professors, 3 laboratory technicians, 1 research professor, 1 research associate professor, 3 research assistants and 3 postdoctoral fellows.
Teaching & Training
The Department is a pioneer in the education reform of Medical Statistics in China. With over 20 years of reform and practice, the course of Medical Statistics has formed a set of scientific, systematic and effective teaching contents and methods. The Medical Statistics course has been rated as the Excellent Course of Guangdong (2005), the National Excellent Courses (2008), the National Excellent Bilingual Demonstration Course (2010), the Excellent Online Education Course of Guangdong (2011), the Guangdong Excellent Video Open Course (2012), the National Excellent Resources Sharing Course (2013), the Excellent Course for Foreign Students (English speaking) of the Ministry of Education (2013), Best Teaching Team of Guangdong (2015), and the National High-quality Online Public Course (2017); and won the Teaching Award of Guangdong twice for the first prize (1997 & 2017) and once for the second prize (2010) .
The Department has successively edited the fifth, sixth and seventh editions of the National textbook of “Health Statistics”, among which the fifth edition was awarded the first prize of the National Excellent Medical Textbook by the Ministry of Health. So far, the teaching team has published 56 teaching-related papers and obtained 22 teaching reform projects. In terms of promoting the sharing of high-quality teaching resources, the Medical Statistics of Sun Yat-sen University is the first MOOC course of its kind launched in China.
The Department is responsible for Medical Statistics, Health Statistics, Pharmaceutical Mathematical Statistics, AIDS Health Education and Introduction to Global Health for undergraduate students. It is also responsible for the Medical Statistical Methods and Clinical Applications, Medical Research Design and Statistical Analysis, Multivariate Analysis and Statistical Package, Sampling Survey Techniques and Applications for Msc, PhD and MPH students. Altogether, the Department hosts more than 2500 class hours and over 3000 students per year.
At present, the Department has trained 55 PhDs and 182 Msc students in Health Statistics, and 253 MPH students in Public Health.
Research
The main research areas of the Department include: 1. Statistical methods and medical applications (spatiotemporal statistical methods, time series analysis, structural equation model, item response theory, Bayesian statistical methods, etc.); 2. Clinical trial design and statistical analysis; 3. Health behavior intervention and effect evaluation; 4. Healthy aging research; 5. Theories and methods of global health and applications; 6. Health promotion methods and applications for migrants. The Department has the Key Medical Laboratory of Guangdong, the Health Informatics Laboratory, facilitating the implementation of community-based large-scale population research. In the recent five years, the Department received 77 grants, including the National 12th and 13th Five-Year Projects on “Community-based comprehensive prevention and control of HIV/AIDS, viral hepatitis and tuberculosis in Guangdong"; 11 National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) grants; 7 international grants funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH-US), the China Medicine Board (CMB), and the Wellcome Trust; 31 Provincial projects, and 25 other projects. Altogether, the Department obtained 60 million RMB research grants in the past five years, and published 122 papers in International Journals and 126 papers in Chinese Core Journals.
Social services
For the social service, three of our staff also are director/deputy director/secretary general in national academic organizations, six of them are standing committee members, four are director/vice director/secretary general in provincial academic organizations, and five are standing committee members/members. Five members serves as editors of academic journals.
