Joe Koopmeiners has distinguished himself as a medical researcher and academic leader.

A Mayo Professor and head of the Division of Biostatistics at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, Koopmeiners is among the U of M’s youngest department heads leading one of its highest-funded units. The Division of Biostatistics recently received $200 million to support its work coordinating clinical trials for the National Institutes of Health’s Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines initiative.

Koopmeiners, who has a doctorate in biostatistics from the University of Washington, has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles in top biostatistics and medical journals. His research focuses on the design and monitoring of clinical trials, tobacco regulatory science and biomedical imaging for cancer detection research. He is the country’s only statistician funded by the National Institutes of Health to develop statistical methods for tobacco regulatory science and holds two U.S. patents related to his work for the Department of Defense to develop MRI as a diagnostic tool for prostate cancer.

Koopmeiners is helping the Division of Biostatistics develop an outreach program with St. Paul Public Schools to make biostatistics more accessible to students who have traditionally been underrepresented in STEM fields.