March 3, 2008
Andrei Yakovlev mourned
The University is mourning the loss of Andrei
Yakovlev, professor and chair of the Department of Biostatistics and
Computational Biology, who died February 27 at his home in Mendon. He was
63.
Since joining the Medical Center in 2002, Yakovlev led
a major expansion in biostatistics. Tenure-track faculty grew from seven to
21 members, and sponsored research increased from $800,000 to more than $5
million annually, totaling $37 million over the past five years. He was
recognized as a brilliant scholar and collaborator, always brimming with
ideas that challenged conventional wisdom.
“Andrei was the answer to our hopes for a chair
of biostatistics and computational biology, the rare individual who had
facility in both of these fields,” said David Guzick, dean of
the School of Medicine and Dentistry. “When we set out to hire a
chair, we needed someone with the flexibility to work back and forth
between mathematics, statistics, and systems biology. We also needed a
leader who could attract outstanding senior faculty and mentor junior
faculty and students. He accomplished all of this in spades and did so by
creating a collegial, welcoming environment.”
Last November Guzick attended a small gathering in
Yakovlev’s department to celebrate five years of success and hard
work. “I was struck by the genuine warmth. Andrei was very outspoken;
he would say exactly what he thought—and that can be off-putting to
some people. But everyone recognized that he cared about them deeply. He
was remarkable.”
“His approach to work was both brilliant and
inspiring to all who came into contact with him, and motivated us all to
think differently about our research,” said Medical Center CEO
Bradford Berk. “I personally worked with Andrei on statistical
analysis of gene expression profiles and found his critical approach
challenging, engaging, and educational. His strong leadership has resulted
in a thriving department, which will play an integral part in moving our
strategic plan forward. We will all miss his passion and
intellect.”
Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, Yakovlev became a U.S.
citizen in 2005. During the 1990s he was a visiting professor at
universities in France, Australia, and Germany, and taught at Ohio State
University and the University of California at Santa Barbara. Prior to
arriving in Rochester, he was director of the Division of Biostatistics at
the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City
from 1998 to 2002.
While in Utah, Yakovlev began working on a series of
landmark studies involving differentiation of stem cells with the
internationally recognized stem cell team of Mark Noble, Chris Proschel,
and Margot Mayer-Proschel. Eventually they all ended up in Rochester.
“Working with Andrei was one of the great
scientific joys of our lives,” said Noble, professor of genetics.
“He changed the way we thought about stem cell biology in profound
ways. He was able to see great distances down the road of knowledge, and he
was constantly coming up with new ways to solve problems that others had
long dismissed as too difficult.”
His death is a huge loss for the scientific community,
agreed Chris Proschel, a fellow stem cell researcher. “The hallmark
of his mind was that he questioned everything, literally every assumption
ever made, at the peril of running against the stream,” Proschel
said. “He was as rigorous a scientist as I’ve ever met.”
Yakovlev’s research appeared in four books and
almost 200 scientific papers, in mathematics, statistics, biomathematics,
and biology journals. He investigated stochastic modeling in cell biology,
carcinogenesis, gene expression data analysis, and survival analysis. Some
of his work related to cancer and the survival benefits of screening and
certain treatments, and prediction of clinical outcomes.
“His recent and ongoing research in methods of
statistical analysis of gene expression data is extraordinary, discovering
major flaws in widely used methodology and creating innovative methods to
overcome them,” said Jack Hall, professor of Biostatistics.
Indeed, researchers who knew him well noted his
ability to reshape thinking about medicine and science through mathematics.
“Before I met Andrei I never thought the world
of numbers and probabilities could be fun and exciting and could
fundamentally change the way I see experiments,” said Mayer-Proschel.
“I will terribly miss his insight, his genius, and his sense of
humor.”
Yakovlev earned his medical degree in 1967 from the
First Leningrad Medical School, a doctorate in biology in 1973 from the
Pavlov Institute of Physiology of the Academy of Sciences, USSR, and a
doctorate in mathematics from Moscow State University in 1981. In St.
Petersburg, he chaired a department of Biomathematics (1978 to 1988) and
Applied Mathematics (1988 to 1992).
He was an advisor to the World Health Organization and
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; a member of the Russian Academy of
Sciences (1992); a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics
(1998) and American Statistical Association (2000) and elected member of
the International Statistical Institute (2002).
In addition to his professional accomplishments,
friends and colleagues point out that Yakovlev was the life of the party.
He liked to play piano and engage in lively discussions about art, music,
politics, and history.
Yakovlev was married and had two sons, one of whom
died in Russia. He is survived by his wife, Nina, and a young son, Yuri.
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