Jeffrey Blume

Jeffrey Blume is a data scientist, administrator, and biostatistician with extensive experience building and leading academic programs. In spring 2026, he was appointed Interim Dean of the University of Virginia School of Data Science, where he supports the School’s continued growth in research, education, and partnerships while advancing its mission to practice and teach responsible data science for the common good.

Prior to joining UVA, Blume served as Director of Graduate Education at the Vanderbilt Data Science Institute and as Vice Chair of Education in the Department of Biostatistics at Vanderbilt University. He was also a tenured Professor of Biostatistics with secondary appointments in Biomedical Informatics and Biochemistry. Over the course of his career, Blume has played a central role in developing interdisciplinary academic programs, including proposing and establishing the Master of Science in Data Science at Vanderbilt and launching the Master of Public Health program at Brown University.

Blume’s areas of research and collaboration include radiology, cancer diagnosis and prediction, nephrology, translational biomedicine, functional MRI, and women’s health. His published work spans a wide range of statistical and biomedical topics, including evidential philosophy of statistical inference, likelihood methods, second-generation p-values, prediction modeling, mediation modeling, ROC curves, sequential testing, clinical trial design, empirical Bayes methods for biomedical data, false discovery rates, model selection, and neuroimaging.

Blume holds a Ph.D. in Biostatistics from Johns Hopkins University and a B.A. in Statistics from the University at Buffalo.