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Metcalf winner's magic brings statistics to life

By Brian Fitzgerald

When most non-math majors enroll in a required statistics course, they brace for a semester of mental torture. They envision sitting through months of dry lectures on standard deviations, variables, and bell curves -- and then tearing their hair at exam time.

Lisa Sullivan receives her Metcalf Award from Chancellor John Silber. BU Photo Services

To such math-phobes Lisa Sullivan, SPH associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics, lends a sympathetic ear. She teaches two introductory statistics courses, one for undergraduates on the Charles River Campus and the other for graduate students at SPH. In both, she has repeatedly earned praise for making complex subject matter interesting and accessible to those with little background in mathematics.

"I have always loathed math," wrote one student last fall in an end-of-term course evaluation, "but since I began MA115 I look forward to class."

"Professor Sullivan made this course, which is a necessary evil for so many of us, virtually painless," commented another.

"She has the patience of a god," wrote a third, in a letter of recommendation to the Metcalf Committee.

Sullivan (GRS'86,'92) earned her Ph.D. in mathematics and statistics under a teaching fellowship. She continued at the University as an adjunct professor before accepting a full-time position at the School of Public Health in 1996. She has won several faculty awards, including SPH's 2000 Norman A. Scotch Award for Excellence in Teaching, and is a coauthor of the textbook Introductory Applied Biostatistics.

Far from working in a drab discipline, Sullivan has made contributions to intriguing areas of public health research. She has analyzed data in studies of breast cancer and HIV, for instance, and in a survey of health care among the poor. Two years ago she was a coinvestigator in an SPH study of workplace stress.

"What's so interesting about statistics is that you can apply the techniques to any field," Sullivan says. "That's what keeps it fun and exciting. You can work with different groups of people on different substantive areas, and while you bring something to the table, you also learn from what they're doing."

Since 1999 Sullivan has worked on the Framingham Heart Study, a long-running study of Framingham, Mass., residents administered by BU, and is a member of the University's Statistics and Consulting Unit. Often she will borrow from her research to illustrate a concept in class. Recently she had students calculate their chances of contracting heart disease by plugging into a formula such factors as their cholesterol count and blood pressure. (To try it, visit http://hin.nhlbi.nih.gov/atpiii/calculator.asp) The method, known as a health-risk appraisal function, was developed by CAS Mathematics Professor Ralph D'Agostino, Sullivan's mentor since her graduate school days, who won the Metcalf Cup and Prize in 1985.

"Lisa is just a superb teacher," says D'Agostino, the heart study's director of data management and analysis. "I've observed her for years in the classroom. She has a good sense of humor and students identify with her. Math phobia just comes crashing to a halt when she enters their lives.

"She's a wonderful colleague also," he adds. "She does a lot of interdisciplinary work and has an amazing ability to get relatively sophisticated concepts across to the nonmathematicians we work with."

Besides Sullivan's research, the news media are another helpful source of lecture material. As part of a lesson on estimating proportions, Sullivan brought in a March Boston Globe report on a survey of Massachusetts teenagers in which 10 percent of the respondents said they had attempted suicide.

"That was a good one for the undergraduates, because it was about people close to their age," she says. "It was an issue they could talk about, and it drove home what we are trying to accomplish in class using a real-world example."

Sullivan acknowledges that hers is a misunderstood branch of mathematics, as it lacks equations with discrete final answers.

"Statistics is a set of techniques for summarizing information and finding patterns and trends," she explains. "Sometimes people say, well, you can say anything with statistics, which is not true, because certain principles need to be applied. But there are different ways you can look at the information and interpret it, and that's what's fun in a class. I will present information from an area that I may or may not be familiar with, such as child psychology, but I can say to my students, here are the statistics, now what do you make of it? And they can often talk much more intelligently about the subject because they know more about it than I do. So they lead the discussion."

In their recommendation letters, colleagues and students laud Sullivan for her sense of humor and ability to keep everyone in a large lecture hall alert and motivated. The material is challenging, and includes computer applications normally found in higher-level courses, but with Sullivan's encouragement a number of arts and humanities majors wind up taking statistics as a minor. Others have found jobs through her connections in industry.

Atara Tatelman (CAS'01) recalls feeling "petrified" on her first day in Sullivan's class and did, in fact, struggle with the course work. "I met with her after the first class and she made it clear that she would do anything to help me succeed," Tatelman wrote in a letter to the award committee. "I was a regular at her weekly office hours . . . She was supportive and encouraging and I found myself gaining confidence. Every time I sat in her office and cried out of frustration -- and there were many times -- she would tell a joke or a funny story and I would be laughing before I knew it. Her faith in me, and devotion to me, as well as to the long line of students that wait outside her door, is incredible."

For Sullivan, the admiration is mutual. "I love working with students and the whole interaction with them," she says. "And it really is an interaction. I get a lot back."

8 June 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations