Heather Bush, Ph.D.
Professor, Faculty Associate
Heather M. Bush, Ph.D. is a Faculty Associate at the Center on Trauma and Children. She is also the Kate Spade & Company Foundation Endowed Professor in the Center for Research on Violence Against Women. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biostatistics, College of Public Health. Prior to her academic appointment in 2006, Dr. Bush worked as a Senior Biostatistician in industry and was responsible for the design and analysis of Phase IV studies, observational studies, health registries, and large simple safety studies. In this role, she was responsible for developing protocols, designing observational studies, and overseeing SAS programming for reporting and data analysis. Building on these experiences, she has helped to transform the statistical support provided to investigators at the University of Kentucky through her leadership roles with the Clinical Translational Science Center BERD, the Applied Statistics Lab (co-founded), and DATAQUeST (co-founded). Her work continues to focus on outcomes research, but with an emphasis on injury and violence, especially as it applies to women’s health and student populations. She teaches in the BPH, MPH, and DrPH programs as well as the PhD in Epidemiology and Biostatistics program; her teaching focus is in statistical consulting and practice. She is the author of an introductory textbook, Biostatistics: An Applied Introduction for the Public Health Practitioner. Dr. Bush has won the Provost’s Award for Outstanding Teaching, the College of Public Health’s Golden Apple Award, and Dean’s Outstanding Teaching Performance Award.
Dr. Bush teaches courses at the undergraduate, professional, and graduate levels; her teaching interests focus on statistical consulting and introductory applications of biostatistics (generalized linear mixed models and longitudinal data analysis). She has also developed the biostatistics curriculum with a focus on concepts for the University’s general education and the biostatistics methods courses for the Bachelor’s in Public Health.