Dr. Benn (preferred pronouns: she/her) is an Associate Professor in the Center for Biostatistics and Department of Population Health Science and Policy and Founding Director of the Center for Scientific Diversity at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS). She is also the Director of Data Science Training and Enrichment in the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and serves as a member of the Quality Leadership Council, Faculty Diversity Council and Anti-racism Task Force at ISMMS. She has also served as co-Director of the Master of Science in Biostatistics Program and Director of Academic Programs for the Center for Biostatistics at ISMMS. Dr. Benn has collaborated on a variety of health disparities-related research projects over the course of her career and also teaches a graduate-level course, Race and Causal Inference, aimed at increasing the methodologic rigor by which we investigate health disparities with a goal of finding effective causal targets for intervention.
Dr. Benn is committed to increasing diversity, inclusion, and equitable advancement in (bio)statistics and STEM fields, more broadly, as well as reducing racial/ethnic disparities in faculty promotion in academic medicine. She currently serves on the American Statistical Association (ASA) Antiracism Task Force and formerly served on the ASA Sexual Harassment and Assault Task Force. Dr. Benn is the co-founder of the NHLBI-funded Biostatistics Epidemiology Summer Training (BEST) Diversity Program and a former co-Chair of the ENAR Fostering Diversity in Biostatistics Workshop. She also serves as a mentor for the JSM Diversity Workshop and Mentoring Program and the Math Alliance. Dr. Benn was co-PI of the NIGMS-funded Applied Statistics in Biological Systems (ASIBS) Short Course aimed at increasing the statistical competency and research capacity of early stage researchers nationwide. She currently is co-PI of the NHGRI-funded Clinical Research Education in Genome Science (CREiGS) Short Course aimed at exposing doctoral students, postdocs, and clinical and research faculty to computational tools in genome science in addition to effective strategies for engaging underserved communities in genomics research. Dr. Benn’s contributions to diversity and inclusion in statistics and STEM have been celebrated by various organizations including Mathematically Gifted and Black and the American Statistical Association.