Jrminter
85 posts, incept 2008-10-09
2020-06-10 09:07:36
I am not surprised that she has a Ph.D. and not an M.D. because many health care workers interested in epidemiology go that route. I would note that Johns Hopkins has the large Bloomberg School of Public Health. They do a lot of research into the epidemiology of many diseases and, for example, studied the public health consequences of airborne particulates. As you might expect, statistical analysis plays a large part in such research. Hopkins has a large, well respected Biostatistics group with this type of focus.
I would also note that many Ph.D. students marry in grad school. I did. My wife and I have Ph. D. degrees from the same department.
I had a very good Ph.D. advisor. He was trained as a Materials Scientist. He taught our group that the purpose of a Ph. D. was to teach you the skills to find an important scientific problem, to then learn what you need from the literature and from colleagues and then solve that problem and report the results in a peer-reviewed journal. It was good advise. I spent 37 years doing just that in a corporate analytical laboratory.
We need mature epidemiologists to conduct the study into infectious diseases. None are perfect. Some self destruct (Professor Neil Ferguson comes to mind...) All are human and make mistakes. That is why peer review is so important.