For the second year in a row, Yale School of Public Health Professor Donna Spiegelman, Sc.D., has been named a top female scientist by Research.com. Spiegelman ranked 27th in the website’s 2023 evaluation of the best female scientists in the United States and 36th among top female scientists in the world. She was also Yale’s highest-ranking female scientist on the lists, with an overall national ranking of 335 and a world ranking of 496.
“I felt very happy and proud to be recognized,” said Spiegelman. “I’ve been in this career for 35 years, and maybe even longer if you count the time I was a graduate student, and so it’s very nice to have that recognition and learn that my work has been cited and read by so many people and hopefully has had an impact.”
The Research.com ranking of top female scientists is based on information acquired from “a wide range of bibliometric sources including OpenAlex and CrossRef on Dec. 21, 2022,” according to the website. Position in the ranking is based on a researcher’s overall H-index, an index that incorporates both the productivity of the researcher as well as their citation impact. The ranking of top female scientists comprises leading researchers from all core science areas. Rankings were based on a detailed evaluation of 166,880 profiles on Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Graph, the website said. At the end of 2022, Spiegelman had an H-index of 175, with 111,719 citations, and 848 publications.
This is the second year the website has published rankings for top researchers. Spiegelman received top honors in 2022, as well.
Spiegelman holds a joint doctorate in biostatistics and epidemiology. She was appointed the Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Biostatistics at the Yale School of Public Health in 2018 and is also a Professor of Statistics and Data Science at Yale. She founded and directs the Yale Center for Methods in Implementation and Prevention Science (CMIPS). She also directs the Dissemination and Implementation Research Core within the Yale Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA). She is deeply passionate about her work and wants to use her talents and training to make an impact in public health, especially in areas where it has been proven that evidence-based cost-effective interventions can prevent major causes of death and sickness around the world, including cervical cancer, heart disease, HIV, and mental health.
“My goal is to be a part of a team or to lead a team where we are applying interventions in the United States and around the world to ensure that disadvantaged populations have access to quality health care and other supports, to reduce these disparities in preventive and curative interventions,” Spiegelman said. “In addition, I want to continue to advance the work in this area by developing powerful statistical methods to improve the rigor, relevance. and responsiveness of this research.”
Spiegelman credits Yale with providing her the resources needed to build and grow CMIPS. She says CMIPS is currently supporting about 35 different grants and has brought more than $60 million in grant funding to Yale since it started.