The University of Washington School of Public Health (UW SPH) is pleased to announce faculty taking on new leadership appointments starting in the 2025-26 academic year. These leadership roles support our shared work of solving the greatest public health challenges and serving communities in our state, country, and world.
An asterisk denotes that the appointment is pending approval from the University of Washington Board of Regents
Helen Chu | Associate Dean for Research, School of Public Health
Dr. Helen Chu will assume the role of associate dean for research on October 1, 2025. In this role, she will lead generative conversations and initiatives to ensure that the research enterprise at the School and university evolves to meet emerging challenges. Chu aims to improve research infrastructure and support in SPH and catalyze forward-looking opportunities for collaborative research within the School and other entities on and off campus. She will also serve as primary representative from SPH to other research entities on campus externally and lead the SPH Research Council.
Chu is a professor in the Division of Allergy & Infectious Diseases in the Department of Medicine with a joint appointment in the Department of Epidemiology in the School of Public Health. Helen received her MPH in Epidemiology from the UW School of Public Health in 2012 and was recognized as one of SPH’s 50 Alumni of Impact in 2020. She is a board-certified physician in infectious diseases who co-leads the Seattle Flu Study. She received the Washington Leadership Award from Governor Inslee in 2021, in recognition of her contributions to the state during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her team was responsible for identifying the first case of community-spread COVID and for standing up testing of the UW community during the pandemic, as well as testing for vulnerable populations across the state. More recently, she served as a voting member of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices until the members of the committee were summarily terminated in June.
Ali Shojaie | Interim Chair, Biostatistics
Ali Shojaie stepped into the interim chair of the Department of Biostatistics on July 1, 2025. In this role, Shojaie is focusing on preserving and expanding the department’s tradition of excellence and rigor in education and scholarship. He aims to work closely with—and empower—faculty, students, staff, and other partners to tackle pressing challenges in public health and medicine by harnessing the growing availability of data, advances in statistical theory, and rapid developments in computing.
Shojaie is a professor of biostatistics and statistics. He is the founding director of the Summer Institute for Statistics in Big Data at the UW and leads the Data Management and Statistics Core of the UW Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. His research lies at the intersection of statistical machine learning, statistical network analysis and applications in biology and social sciences. He is an elected fellow of both the American Statistical Association (ASA) and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and he received the 2022 Leo Breiman Award from the ASA Section on Statistical Learning and Data Science.
Janet Baseman | Associate Dean for Public Health Practice
Janet Baseman assumed her prior role of associate dean for public health practice on July 1, 2025, after serving as the interim chair of the Department of Epidemiology. As associate dean, Baseman works to advance the School’s vision for bringing academic and practice communities together by building strong academic and practice-based partnerships, expanding student and faculty opportunities with the practice community, and increasing evidence-based research.
Baseman’s own research centers around applied epidemiology in public health practice, strategies for improving disease surveillance systems, and public health informatics. In addition to her role as epidemiology professor, she is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Health Systems and Population Health and is a member of the Northwest Center for Public Health Practice (NWCPHP) Research Team.