“A lot of scientific questions in medicine are mathematical [in nature],” said Dr. Nilanjan Chatterjee, Head of Biostatistics Branch of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the National Cancer Institute, U.S. So a sound knowledge of both medicine and mathematics is required to solve these questions. In the case of Dr. Chatterjee, besides medicine and mathematics, he has a firm grounding in statistics too, and this helped him become the first Indian to win the prestigious COPSS President Award in August 2011. The award is given to young statisticians below 40 years. He also won the COPSS Snedecor Award.
