This year, the Center for Biostatistics and Health Data Science has something very special to celebrate. Our director, Alex Hanlon, was promoted to Professor with tenure in Virginia Tech's Department of Statistics. We are incredibly proud of Alex and this important milestone, but we also think her promotion represents something much bigger. It says something important about Virginia Tech, the Department of Statistics, and how we recognize the many different ways faculty can contribute to science.

For many years, academic success was defined largely by independence. Faculty were expected to establish their own areas of scholarship, lead their own grants, develop their own methods, and demonstrate a body of work that was clearly their own. There is tremendous value in independent scholarship, and there always will be. But many of the most important scientific questions we face today are simply too complex to be addressed by one investigator or one discipline. Great science increasingly requires people with very different expertise coming together around an important problem and working as a team.

Our federal funding agencies clearly recognize this shift. NSF gives high priority to interdisciplinary and convergence research, which intentionally brings together scientists from different disciplines to address problems that cannot be solved within a single field. Importantly, NSF emphasizes bringing different disciplines together from the inception of the research so that they can help frame the questions and approaches together.

NIH has recently reinforced this direction. In June 2026, NIH described biomedical research as an increasingly collaborative and interdisciplinary enterprise and asked the scientific community to help rethink how the contributions of modern science should be measured, recognized, and incentivized. NIH specifically identified collaboration and the need to better recognize contributions to team based science.

For those of us at CBHDS, this feels very familiar. It is how we have always thought about collaborative statistical science. A collaborative statistician is not simply someone who receives a dataset at the end of a study and performs an analysis. Our best work often begins much earlier. We help investigators refine research questions, design better studies, anticipate problems before data are collected, interpret findings, and decide what questions should come next. Sometimes the contribution is a new statistical method. Other times it is asking the question that changes the direction of a study, recognizing a problem before it occurs, or bringing together people with the right expertise to solve something none of us could solve alone.

That work is scholarship, but historically it has not always fit neatly within academic systems designed around individual accomplishment. Collaborative scholarship is different because its impact is intentionally shared. Contributions may be spread across disciplines, teams, grants, trainees, programs, and years of scientific partnership. For collaborative scientists, that has sometimes made the traditional path through academia complicated.

That is why Alex's promotion is particularly meaningful to us. She has built her career as a collaborative statistician, working alongside investigators in medicine, public health, behavioral science, and many other areas. Her contributions include traditional scholarship as well as building scientific teams and collaborative programs, mentoring investigators and quantitative scientists, developing research infrastructure, and creating opportunities for people from different disciplines to do better science together.

The statistical profession has also recognized the value of this work. In 2019, the American Statistical Association elected Alex as a Fellow, recognizing, among other contributions, her leadership in building collaborative groups and advancing collaborative statistical science. This year, the ASA honored her again with its 2026 Founders Award for sustained contributions to the profession. Both recognitions reflect a career in which collaboration, mentorship, service, and scholarship have always been closely connected.

What makes the Virginia Tech story especially meaningful is that Alex's path to Professor with tenure was not a traditional one. She came to Virginia Tech as a Professor of Practice, recruited by then Department Head Ron Fricker, and built a career centered heavily on collaborative statistical science. As that career evolved, Ron and College of Science Dean Kevin Pitts were willing to think creatively with Alex about how a less traditional body of scholarship, leadership, and scientific impact could be appropriately recognized within the university. That willingness to look beyond a single model of academic success was enormously important, and we are deeply grateful for it.

For Ron, who now serves as Virginia Tech's Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, supporting collaborative scholars is also part of creating the kind of university where outstanding faculty want to build their careers:

"Universities that create an environment where scholars can work genuinely across those boundaries not only produce better, more impactful research, but they also become places where the very best faculty want to build their careers. Alex is a wonderful example of that. We were fortunate to recruit an extraordinary scholar who understood the power of collaborative science, and Virginia Tech's commitment to interdisciplinary research gave her the opportunity to build something truly distinctive her".

That support has continued across successive leaders in the Department of Statistics. Dave Higdon and Eric Smith each supported Alex as she continued along this path, and Bobby Gramacy carries that tradition forward today. Different leaders have been involved at different points, but there has been a remarkable consistency in their willingness to recognize that there is more than one way for a statistician to have scholarly impact. Kevin has similarly continued to champion faculty success and collaborative science within the College of Science. For CBHDS, that continuity of leadership is an important part of what makes Virginia Tech special.

There is something especially fitting about this story when viewed through the history of Virginia Tech Statistics. The Department of Statistics was established in 1949 and is one of the oldest statistics departments in the country. The Statistical Laboratory was established one year earlier, in 1948. From its earliest days, Virginia Tech Statistics recognized both statistics as a discipline and the value of bringing statistical expertise to problems across the university.

In many ways, Virginia Tech was progressive then, and it is progressive now.

More than 75 years ago, Virginia Tech was willing to think differently about the role of statistics within a university. Today, it is showing the same willingness to think differently about what a successful statistical scholar can look like. And the timing is striking. NIH is asking how we better recognize and incentivize collaborative science, while NSF continues to invest in scientific models built around deep integration across disciplines. Virginia Tech has already demonstrated something important: supporting team science also means supporting the careers of the people who make team science possible.

That matters for the next generation of collaborative statisticians and data scientists. They should know that they do not necessarily have to choose between being deeply collaborative and building a successful academic career. Building teams, mentoring scientists, shaping studies, developing research infrastructure, and helping other disciplines solve important problems can all be meaningful forms of scholarly impact.

CBHDS congratulates Alex on her promotion to Professor with tenure and on receiving the ASA Founders Award this year. But this story is also an opportunity for us to say thank you. We are deeply grateful to Ron Fricker, Dave Higdon, Eric Smith, Bobby Gramacy, Kevin Pitts, the Department of Statistics, the College of Science, and Virginia Tech for recognizing the value of collaborative statistical science and for supporting a path that has not always been the traditional one.

There is something wonderful about seeing the priorities of NIH and NSF moving so clearly toward interdisciplinary and team based science while looking back at a Virginia Tech Statistics tradition that began more than 75 years ago with the idea that statisticians should work in partnership with scientists across disciplines.

Virginia Tech was forward thinking then. It continues to be forward thinking today.

If the future of science is collaborative, then the future of academic recognition has to be collaborative too. We are very proud, and very grateful, to be part of a university that understands that.