David L. DeMets Lectures

DeMets Lectures

The Lectures

The David L. DeMets Lectures in Health and Quantitative Investigation are a pair of lectures held on a Thursday and Friday each November.

These lectures acknowledge Dr. DeMets’ research accomplishments in forwarding the design, monitoring, analysis, and presentation of clinical trials.

The first lecture is a research/overview talk is accessible to a general biomedical/public health audience. Ideally, it will highlight in one or more ways critical and impactful contributions from quantitative methodological areas (e.g., biostatistics and/or biomedical informatics) to discoveries in biomedicine, and/or advancement of human/public health. The second lecture is a world-class research talk in biostatistics or biomedical informatics.

The lecturer chosen each year exemplifies the “David DeMets Model of Biomedical Research” with rigorous development and application of quantitative methodological principles, married with deep engagement in an area of biomedical investigation.

2025 DeMets Lectures

The 9th annual DeMets Lectures will consist of one presentation on November 20. This lecture will be held in the Morgridge Hall Seminar Room (7560 Morgridge Hall) from 1:00-1:45, followed by a light refreshments in the lobby of the seminar room.

2025 DeMets Lecture Speaker

Mark Gerstein, PhD
Albert L Williams Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Professor of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry, of Computer Science, and of Statistics & Data Science

Mark Gerstein, PhD is the Albert L Williams Professor of Biomedical Informatics, and Professor of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry, of Computer Science, and of Statistics and Data Science. Dr. Gerstein earned his PhD in Biophysics and Chemistry from Cambridge University, followed by a postdoc in Bioinformatics at Stanford University.

Dr. Gerstein joined Yale University as assistant professor in 1997 and has served in a number of roles, including co-director of the Yale Computational Biology and Biomedical Informatics Program. His research interests focus on biomedical data science, machine learning, macromolecular simulation, human genome annotation & disease genomics, and genomic privacy.

Dr. Gerstein has been elected as Fellow in three organizations: the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAIA – 2024), International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB – 2015), and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS – 2009). In 2023, he received the Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award from ISCB. He serves on a number of editorial boards, including PL0S Comp Bio, Genome Biology, Molecular Systems Biology, BMC Bioinformatics, Molecular and Cellular Proteomics, Protein Science and Molecular Biology & Evolution. He is the co-head of the Big Data & Analytics Section for the open access publishing platform F1000.

He has served on a number of committees, including co-chairing the NHGRI Analysis Working Group, several federal committees and study sections, and has been a trustee of the Churchill Cambridge Scholarship since 2022.