News

We are pleased to announce that Meredith Wallace, PhD, has been promoted to Professor of Psychiatry by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. 

Dr. Wallace earned her PhD in biostatistics from the University of Pittsburgh and conducted postdoctoral research training in the Department of Psychiatry’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)-funded clinical investigation in psychiatry T32 training program. She completed additional postdoctoral training in the Department of Statistics. 

Dr. Wallace is recognized nationally and internationally as an exceptionally innovative biostatistician, as well as a leader in the field of multidimensional sleep health. By incorporating novel statistical methods such as the application of machine learning to high-dimensional datasets, she has advanced personalized medicine research. Dr. Wallace has contributed critical insights that have influenced the methodological framework for determining the influence of sleep health on health outcomes, including mortality. Since 2024, she has served as director of sleep, circadian rhythms, and health analytics in the Department of Psychiatry.

Dr. Wallace’s pioneering development and application of original methodologies is critical to her National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded research. She is currently multiple principal investigator (MPI) on a multi-site U01 award funded by the National Institute on Aging that is focused on applying computational methods to identify sleep signatures predictive of mental health outcomes among youth in pediatric primary care. In addition, she is PI of an NIA-funded RF1 grant focused on applying novel machine learning techniques to examine multidimensional sleep health for predicting changes in global cognition, incident dementia, and depressive symptoms in older adults. On the Department of Psychiatry’s National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Center of Excellence (P50) grant to fund the Center for Adolescent Reward, Rhythms and Sleep, Dr. Wallace serves as the Data and Statistics Management Core lead. As a statistical collaborator to many investigators in the Department, Dr. Wallace currently serves as a co-investigator on nine NIH grants and two Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) grants.

Dr. Wallace has published her research in top journals and has delivered invited presentations nationally and internationally. She has provided grant reviews for the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, the NIH, and for PCORI. Dr. Wallace is a member of the National Sleep Foundation Napping Consensus Panel, and is an elected member of the Board of Directors of the Classification Society. She serves on the statistical editorial board of SLEEP, as a statistical reviewer for Lancet Psychiatry, and holds additional editorial positions at Sleep Health and Journal of Classification. At the University, Dr. Wallace co-founded and co-leads the StatsEye consortium, a psychiatry and statistics collaborative group.

An outstanding teacher and mentor, Dr. Wallace provides valuable contributions to the education of the next generation of scientists and statisticians. Among her achievements, she has mentored and/or provided statistical consultation for postdoctoral scholars and medical and graduate students, as well as early-career faculty. She serves as a training faculty member on two postdoctoral T32 training programs in the Department, one on alcohol and the other on sleep medicine. Dr. Wallace has provided statistical consultation for multiple NIH K awards by Psychiatry faculty members.

“Dr. Wallace is an exceptional statistical and scientific leader and crucial collaborator in the Department of Psychiatry. She is internationally recognized for her contributions in both biostatistics and multidimensional sleep health research. Dr. Wallace is also a superb teacher and mentor and has applied her broad vision of interdisciplinary collaboration to building a statistical methods in psychiatry community,” said David Lewis, MD (Chair, Department of Psychiatry).

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Wallace!