Dana Farber Data Science | Training Sessions

The Marvin Zelen Memorial Symposium is a flagship annual conference promoting data science in the public sphere. Each year features a new theme that is current in the field of biostatistics and features speakers from across the country who are experts in their fields.

Previous themes include:

Data-Driven Controversies in Science
Health Disparities in Cancer
Machine Learning inMedical Imaging: From New Techniques to Clinical Translation
Data Visualization
Data Science in Biomedical Research: Learning from Other Disciplines
Contemporary Statistics Challenges in Clinical Reseearch
Clinical Trials in the Era of Precision Medicine

YouTube Playlist

Marvin Zelen Symposium 2026

Advancing Reproducible Research: Principles, Practice, and Impact

Tuesday June 16, 2026
1:00pm – 5:00PM

Simmons University, Helen G Drinan Hall [campus map]

Reception to follow.

Join us for a symposium exploring reproducibility from multiple perspectives, bringing together biostatisticians, epidemiologists, MDs, and data scientists to examine why reproducible research matters and how it can be strengthened in practice. Talks will span legal and organizational considerations, practical implementation strategies, and domain-specific applications in areas such as proteomics, global development data, and epidemiology. The program will highlight both challenges and actionable approaches for improving transparency, reliability, and impact across the data-driven research lifecycle.

2026 Speakers

Maria Jones, MA, Senior Economist in the Development Impact (DIME) department at the World Bank
Institutionalizing Reproducibility Standards: the World Bank’s Experience

Chirag Patel, PhD, Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School
Exposomics & Operationalizating the Search for Environmental Factors for Reproducible Discovery and the Emerging Role of AI Agents

Victoria Stodden, PhD, Associate Professor, Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering, at the University of Southern California
Understanding and Assessing Key Reasons for Computational Irreproducibility: Overlooked Social Drivers

Olga Vitek, PhD, Raymond Bradford Bradstreet Professor, Director, Barnett Institute for Chemical and Biological Analysis, Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University
Statistical Methods Increase the Accuracy, Reproducibility and Interpretability of Studies of Proteomes

2025

Marvin Zelen Symposium 2025: Data-Driven Controversies in Science

Friday April 4, 2025
1:00-5:30PM

Agenda

Forecasting the Future: How Accurate Are Our Climate Change Models?

Gavin A. Schmidt, PhD, (Affiliated with the Climate School at Columbia University), Successes and Challenges in Global Climate Modeling

Auroop Ganguly, PhD, (College of Engineering Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University), Opportunities and Challenges in Data Sciences for Earth Systems Sciences and Engineering

Unraveling COVID-19: Origins, Interventions, and Lessons Learned

Marc Lipsitch, DPhil (Professor of Epidemiology at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health), What Were The Impacts Of Nonpharmaceutical Control Interventions on COVID-19 and Consequences

Alina Chan, PhD, (Previous scientific advisor in the Broad Institute), The Case for a Laboratory Origin of Covid-19

Beyond the Hype: Unveiling the Limits of Machine Learning in Science and Medicine

Sayash Kapoor, (Senior Fellow at Mozilla), The Promise and Pitfalls of AI in Science

Arjun Manrai, PhD, (Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School), Statistical Considerations for Medical Artificial Intelligence, Old and New

2024

2024 Marvin Zelen Symposium: Health Disparities and Cancer

Speakers (in order of appearance)

Adewole Adamson, MD, MPP, (Assistant Professor, Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin), AI and Melanoma Disparities

Jinani C Jayasekera Devadoss, PhD (Earl Stadtman investigator in the Division of Intramural Research, National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities), Personalized Clinical Decision Tools to Support Equitable Breast Cancer Care

Cynthia Dwork, PhD (Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science, Harvard University): Individuals, Groups, Indistinguishability, and Loss: 15 Years of Algorithmic Fairness in 20 Minutes

Bogdan Pasaniuc, PhD, (Professor, University of California Los Angeles), Polygenic Risk Scoring in Personalized Medicine: Promises and Challenges

Carmen E. Guerra, MD, MSCE, FACP (Ruth C. and Raymond G. Perelman Professor of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania), The (Mis)use of Race and Ethnicity in Biomedical Research

Nate Fillmore, PhD (VA Boston Healthcare System and Harvard Medical School), Health Disparities and Cancer in the National VA Healthcare System

2023

2023 Marvin Zelen Symposium: Machine Learning in Medical Imaging: From New Techniques to Clinical Translation

Speakers (in order of appearance)

Marzyeh Ghassemi (Assistant Professor at MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Institute for Medical Engineering & Science (IMES), and a Vector Institute faculty member holding a Canadian CIFAR AI Chair and Canada Research Chair. She holds MIT affiliations with the Jameel Clinic and CSAIL), Designing Machine Learning Processes For Equitable Health Systems

Jonathan Chen (Instructor in Pathology, MGH and HMS), Multicellular Networks: Immunity Hubs in Human NSCLC

Jayashree Kalpathy-Cramer (Professor, University of Colorado, MGH, and HMS, chief of the Division of Artificial Medical Intelligence in Ophthalmology at the University of Colorado (CU) School of Medicine), Opportunities and Challenges for Medical Imaging AI – Lessons from Oncology and Ophthalmology

Bill Lotter (Member of the Faculty, DFCI and HMS), AI for Mammography: From Algorithms to Clinical Integration

Shantanu Singh (Principal Investigator and Senior Group Leader, Broad Institute), Fortune-telling with Images: Painting Cells for Discovering Drugs

Andy Beck (Co-founder & CEO, Path AI), AI-powered Tumor Microenvironment Characterization

Polina Golland (Professor in the EECS Department and a principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT), Learning to Read x-ray: Applications to Heart Failure Monitoring

2022

2022 Marvin Zelen Symposium: Data Visualization

Speakers (in order of appearance)

Alvitta Ottley (Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis), The Case for Precision Visualization

Jeffrey Heer (Jerre D. Noe Endowed Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington), Authoring and Visualizing Multiverse Analyses

Amanda Cox (Head of special data projects at USAFacts), End of an Era

Hadley Wickham (Chief Scientist at RStudio, and an Adjunct Professor of Statistics at the University of Auckland, Stanford University, and Rice University), Recent Advances in the ggplot2 Ecosystem

Alberto Cairo (Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the School of Communication of the University of Miami, What You Design is Not What People See

Jessica Hullman (Ginni Rometty Associate Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University), Visualizations as Model Checks

Lace Padilla (Assistant Professor in the Cognitive and Information Sciences Department at the University of California Merced), Impacts of COVID-19 Uncertainty Visualizations

2020

2020 Marvin Zelen Symposium: Data Science 2020

Speakers (in order of appearance)

Amy O’Hara, PhD, (Research Professor, Georgetown University), The 2020 Census: Expected vs. Actual

Brendan Nyhan, PhD, (Professor, Dartmouth College), Selective Exposure to Misinformation: Understanding the Consumption of False News and Anti-Vaccine Content Online

Regina Nuzzo, PhD, (Professor, Gallaudet University), Brain-Hacking Stats Communication: A Quick Tour

Ben Hansen, PhD, (Associate Professor, University of Michigan), The Test of Heightened Election-Year Scrutiny and the Tests in your Table

Charles Stewart, PhD, (Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Puzzling Through Demand for Mail Voting in the 2020 Election

Andrew Revkin, MA, (Director, Initiative on Communication and Innovation, Earth Institute, Columbia University), Taming Social Media for Constructive Climate Crosstalk

Daniel Webb, (Lead Analytics Consultant, United States Olympic Committee), Forecasting the Olympic Games: Team USA’s Medal Prediction Models

Jeremy White, (Graphics Editor, New York Times), Visualizing the Performances of the World’s Greatest Athletes

2019

2019 Marvin Zelen Symposium

Speakers (in order of appearance)

Atul Butte, MD, PhD, (Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Francisco), Translating Ten Trillion Points of Data into Therapies, Diagnostics, and New Insights into Disease

Brandon Rohrer, PhD, (Principal Data Scientist, Facebook), A Field Guide to Data Scientists

Mark Hansen, PhD, (Columbia School of Journalism), Reporting through Computation: How a Group of Journalists Investigated Social Media Fraud

Tamara Broderick, PhD, (ITT Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT), Approximate Cross Validation for Large Data and High Dimensions

Andrew Gelman, PhD, (Professor of Statistics and Political Science, Columbia University), What Percent of Biomedical Research is False? And Why I Don’t Like To Ask That Question

Suchi Saria, PhD, (John C. Malone Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Statistics, and Health Policy at Johns Hopkins University), Augmenting Clinical Intelligence With Machine Intelligence For Individualizing Care

Caroline Buckee, PhD, (Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health), Quantifying Population Displacement During Disasters

Jeff Leek, PhD, (Professor of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health), Medicine Is A Data Science. We Should Teach Like It!