The Loss of a Mentor but not a Legacy

Dr. Bahram Momen

Associate Professor, University of Maryland College Park

During my graduate school years at the University of Maryland, I was honored to have Dr. Bahram Momen as my Biometrics 602 professor. The focus of the class was experimental design. He was incredibly thorough in his lessons, which included weekly lab sessions where we learned how to write the proper SAS codes to analyze data from an array of complex experimental designs. He was constantly debating with students over what was correct and what was erroneous and for that reason, he often did not have many fans. But, his students LEARNED. As an elective, I chose to take his other course in multivariate statistics. It was not long after that I became a teaching assistant for his BIOM602 course, a position I held for several consecutive years. Additionally, with Dr. Momen serving as my formal mentor, I earned academic credit for doing statistics consultations at the University for multiple semesters. I took these opportunities to soak up as much of his wisdom as I could. Dr. Momen was monumental in shaping who I am today and he became a very dear friend. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2018 at the age of 62. The world lost an amazing applied statistician that day and my goal is to perpetuate his legacy. Read more about his legacy here.