by Paul Govern
The University of Amsterdam has awarded the 2019 Spinoza Chair in medicine to Jeffrey Blume, PhD, associate professor of Biostatistics and Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
The Spinoza Chair was established in 1995 by the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam, and is named for Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century Dutch philosopher.
The visiting professorship is awarded to two high-profile laureates each year, one in medicine and the other in philosophy.
Blume will travel to the Netherlands in November. Spinoza Chairs take residence at the university for a week, meeting with faculty and giving “master classes” and short talks.
The chair also delivers the keynote Spinoza Lecture during that week. Blume will speak on the reliability of statistical methods for drawing scientific inference from data, and the usage of machine learning and prediction models in contemporary medicine.
Blume earned his bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York, Buffalo, and his doctorate from John’s Hopkins University.
He joined Vanderbilt in 2008, where he is director of graduate studies in Biostatistics.